One key component in the PEMFC which contributes significantly to cost, weight, volume of the stacks and still needs to be improved to ensure cell lifetime is the BiPolar Plate (BPP). Metal based bipolar plates are very attractive, but a protective coating is needed to avoid corrosion and keep the interfacial contact resistance low.

The STAMPEM-consortium was established acknowledging that further development of BPPs require Europe’s best available resources, with respect to both human competence and infrastructure (laboratories). The objective in STAMPEM was to develop a new generation coating for low cost metallic bipolar plates for PEMFCs, with robust and durable properties for assembly and manufacturing, showing high performance after more than 10000 hours of operation.

The concept of STAMPEM was to combine world leading industrial actors capable of volume manufacturing with research institutions with the required generic competence capable of providing breakthrough solutions with respect to a new generation coating for low cost metallic BPPs. By involving an end user of the BPPs developed in the STAMPEM project, the results were thoroughly verified under realistic operating conditions in a PEMFC stack.

The initial phase of the project was used to establish a testing protocol for BPP materials. In order to screen materials basic corrosion experiments will be performed with contact resistance measurements before and after the testing. Promising materials were further tested in fuel cells and even further in stacks. The BPP materials go through a real mass production cycle, and also the real production cost will be analysed. Also the possible detrimental contamination of the membrane will carefully be investigated. The most promising materials will, in the end, be fully integrated into a system, and be produced in series to provide the building blocks in other fuel cell vehicles.