The core challenges inhibiting the market penetration of fuel cells are their limited service life and the high costs over the entire life cycle. Until now, these have been largely determined by manufacturing costs and are due to costly production technologies that have not been developed for mass production.
The FCPP (Fuel Cell Performance Production) project aims to develop and produce a fuel cell stack with high performance, robustness and marketable efficiency at a lower cost than current products on the market using cost-effective production technologies suitable for mass production. To this end, a cost-effective and resource-efficient inline coating process is being developed and validated.
In parallel, ZBT together with WätaS is researching a particularly robust stack design for high durability requirements with power ratings of > 120 kW for commercial vehicle applications. For this purpose, ZBT focuses on the following research topics:
- Maximizing the area utilization of the cell design to increase the volumetric and gravimetric power density and reduce the material usage
- Research into durable substrate materials and coatings for the bipolar plate for commercial vehicle applications
- Researching the impact of component tolerances on the assembly process and stack performance
- Development of a robust stack assembly process
