First Steps Towards Fuel Cells Testing Harmonisation: Procedures and Parameters for Single Cell Performance Evaluation

The great interest in Fuel Cell Systems, combined with the innovation of the device itself, has led to a huge developmental effort to make the steps necessary for future FC plant commissioning. The clearest and most effective way to evaluate the performance of a fuel cell is to measure it directly and, since few fuel cell test rigs are available at the moment, standard experimental procedures have not been realized so far. Our research group is currently performing single cell testing at the University of Perugia fuel cell laboratory and particular emphasis has been put on the definition of procedures and the testing of parameterisation. The work team strongly believes that this is the key to effective system testing and reliable performance evaluation. In this work, the test parameterisation developed by the team, and the resulting advanced control procedure used for a single MCFC experimental characterization are presented. Efforts have been dedicated to obtain some relevant non‐dimensional parameters to allow an easy understanding of the results and quick comparisons with other tests under different operating conditions, or with results obtained on different cells eventually tested in different laboratories. The authors strongly emphasise this topic to avoid the data that developers and research institutions collect being of no practical use due to a lack of shared rules.