Diagnostic Tools for In-situ and Ex-situ Investigations of Fuel Cells and Components at the German Aerospace Center

The analysis of the processes in fuel cells is a main topic at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The degradation of cell compo-nents – especially electrodes- and changes during start-up proces-ses are of foremost interest. For this purpose physical and electro-chemical methods are used individually and in combination. In this paper, studies using a combination of methods were performed on different fuel cell types. The examples in the field of low tempera-ture fuel cells, namely alkaline fuel cells (AFC), polymer electro-lyte fuel cells (PEFC), and direct methanol fuel cells (DMFC), are mainly focused on the alteration of the electrodes due to electro-chemical operation; for solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) an example for the investigation of the local operating conditions is given