Impact of through-plane gas diffusion layer holes on fuel cell membrane durability deciphered by four-dimensional in-situ X-ray computed tomography visualization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The durability of modern reinforced membranes in proton exchange membrane fuel cell applications is generally considered proven. However, the potential influences of irregular features in adjacent components are commonly overlooked. In this work, the specific impacts of gas diffusion layer (GDL) holes on the combined chemo-mechanical membrane degradation mechanism and associated membrane durability are investigated, using four dimensional in situ X-ray computed tomography visualization. Purposefully designed small-scale membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) are fabricated with through-thickness circular GDL holes of selected dimensions and locations on both anode and cathode. All hole locations show more rapid localized degradation than that at pristine regions. Among the three selected hole sizes (2.0, 0.5, and 0.2 mm 2 ), through-plane membrane cracks are only observed under the smallest holes, both at the hole center and edge. These MEAs with through-plane membrane cracks also had higher membrane thinning rate than the other MEAs; therefore, the through-plane membrane cracks likely elevated chemical stressors as well, presumably through increased gas crossover. Overall, the results suggest that GDL holes can be harmful to membrane chemo-mechanical degradation and the level of severity depends on their size and location.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".