Federal Mogul announces liquid elastomer mould compounds

ERJ staff report (DS)

Southfield Michigan -- Federal-Mogul Corporation claims to have developed an innovative gasket technology to assist in fuel cell development. Federal-Mogul's patented Liquid Elastomer Moulding (LEM) gaskets are constructed with small engineered elastomeric beads moulded onto thin carriers that provide superior sealing performance while significantly reducing the size and weight of each fuel cell stack, compared to other moulded sealing technologies. Each LEM gasket can be 0.3-0.5 mm thick, around half the thickness of conventional moulded gaskets.

A typical fuel cell stack is comprised of several hundred fuel cells; each cell contains an ion exchange membrane and bipolar plates. An electrochemical reaction takes place on the surface of these membranes to combine hydrogen with oxygen releasing electrical energy and water as a byproduct. As a result, each membrane must be sealed from the other layers and from the external environment. Each fuel cell stack requires hundreds of bipolar plates and membrane elements which need to be sealed, thereby requiring hundreds of gaskets, adding length and weight to each fuel cell stack.

Federal-Mogul's patented LEM gasket technology is ideal to address this challenge. In fact, LEM technology has been demonstrated to provide superior sealing performance with a gasket that is estimated to be at least half of the thickness, or size, of other gaskets. Additionally, the LEM technology offers the potential to directly incorporate the gasket into the bipolar plates offering further reduction in assembly complexity.

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Press release from Federal-Mogul