Effect of Potential Cyclic and External Humidity Injection on Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell Performance

In this work, effect of two membrane-electrode assembly (MEA) pre-conditioning procedures of potential cyclic and external humidity injection on the final cell performance and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) response was studied under conditions. Obtained results under steady state condition proposed that humidity injection have a better effect on MEA in order to reach to the maximum performance of MEA compared to potential cyclic under different operation conditions. From the impedance experiments of MEA affected by potential cyclic it was observed that the ohmic, charge transfer and mass transfer resistances of MEA is higher than MEA affected by external humidity injection. Moreover, the polarization technique results show that MEA affected by external humidity injection has higher power density compared with that affected by potential cyclic; 1448mW cm–2vs. 1090mW cm–2.