Corrosion of fuel cell metallic materials cannot be prevented, but there are ways to mitigate it. Environment in the fuel cells can be extremely corrosive and materials for fuel cells construction can deteriorate very fast if appropriate design is not employed [1].

In this work, different metallic materials for fuel cell construction will be tested under various conditions. Especially, an autoclave test will be designed to established corrosion monitoring of these materials at high temperature. Moreover, we will construct an autoclave corrosion cell to monitor corrosion electrochemically by various electrochemical techniques. After the corrosion tests a surface analytical techniques will be employed to reveal the composition of the corroded material (if corrosion will occur) by employing atomic force microscopy, x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, Auger electron spectroscopy, and secondary ion mass spectrometry.

[1] Renato A. Antunes, Mara Cristina L. Oliveira, Gerhard Ett, Volkmar Ett, Corrosion of metal bipolar plates for PEM fuel cells: A review, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, 35 (2010) 3632–3647.

[2] Jixin Chen, Jingwei Hu, James R. Waldecker, Comprehensive Model for Carbon Corrosion during Fuel Cell Start-Up, Journal of The Electrochemical Society, 162 (2015) F878-F889.