Electrochemical Test Procedures for Accelerated Evaluation of Fuel Cell Cathode Catalyst Degradation

The paper introduces an accelerated test procedure that was developed to evaluate the cathode catalyst stability. It is based on systematic analysis of square wave cycles (SWC) in comparison to triangular wave cycles (TWC). Two voltage windows were used: (i) 0.6–0.9 V to simulate the fuel cell drive cycles and (ii) 0.6–1.2 V to accelerate the test. When simulating the drive cycles over 6,000 h, an estimated loss of 40% in electrochemical surface area (ECSA) is found. Increasing the potential window, the testing time could be reduced to 20 h for TWC and for SWC to 4 h.