The robot cell developed by Fraunhofer IPA and Campus Schwarzwald inserts fuel cells in a matter of seconds and fully automatically. The aim is to reduce the price of fuel cell systems.
Two delta robots stack fuel cells into stacks.
Rainer Bez | Fraunhofer IPA
A research team from Fraunhofer IPA and the Black Forest Centre for Digitalization, Leadership and Sustainability (Black Forest Campus) has developed and built a robotic cell for the mass production of fuel cells in the H2FastCell project. Every second, the cell's two robots place a bipolar plate or a membrane electrode unit on the fuel cell stack. A stack consisting of 400 individual fuel cells can thus be produced in around 13 minutes, which is a fraction of the time required for conventional manual production.
Two robots working in parallel stack two fuel cell stacks, which, according to the researchers, leads to particularly precise results. If their cameras register tiny deviations in shape and size during quality control, they assign the bipolar plate or membrane electrode unit to the appropriate stack according to a best-fit approach.
Five Industrial Partners Involved
To prevent vibrations, the suction pads of the robots are made of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic, while a heavy base plate provides additional stability. A digital twin also documents the assembly process in real time. In addition to Fraunhofer IPA and Campus Schwarzwald, the project consortium included the companies ISG, J. Schmalz, i-mation, Teamtechnik and Weiss.
This is a partly automated translation of this german article.