Selection of the Optimized Carbon Material for PEFC Separator

Recently, although PEFC begins to commercialize in various fields such as domestic co-generation system and fuel cell vehicle etc., it is necessary to reduce the cost compared with an existing competitive commodity for a further dissemination. One of the costly parts is the carbon separator which demands a high airtightness, a high drainage and a high durability. The current specification of the carbon separator is not optimized by system requirements of each fuel cell commodity though the environment for which the fuel cell is used by each commodity is different. Therefore, we evaluated the influence of each carbon material characteristic on the cell performance by installing each separator made of each carbon material to the PEFC single cell. As a result, although the influence of thermal conductivity on the cell performance was able to be confirmed, and we also consider that the surface-property of the material greatly influences on the cell performance.