Due to the elimination of ‘land/channel’ geometry in conventional bipolar plates, metal foam as flow distributor in proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) has shown great potential in improving the uniformity of reactant and temperature distributions, which is beneficial to the performance enhancement of the fuel cell. However, the arrangement of metal foam which can be optimized to further enhance the performance of PEMFC has not been considered yet. In the study, nickel metal foam is used as a new type of flow field for experimental research, and compared with the performance of conventional graphite parallel flow field (case 1) in a PEMFC. With respect to the arrangement of metal foam, three cases, namely the use of metal foam either in the anode side (case 2) or cathode side (case 3), and the simultaneous use of metal foam in both sides (case 4), were designed. Experimental results showed that nickel metal foam flow field can make the temperature distribution at the membrane more uniform, which is conducive to the durability of the membrane, and improves the fuel utilization rate. By comparing with case 1 at fully humidified condition, the increase of maximal power density for case 2 is 15.67 %, which is higher than case 3 (6.36 %) and case 4 (9.09 %), indicating the importance of the arrangement of metal foam. The interpretation is that when relative humidity (RH) is high, the cathode side using nickel metal foam flow field is more prone to flooding. Furthermore, a 3-hour constant current test on case 1–4 indicated that at RH = 1, a serious voltage deterioration was observed after 105 min when nickel metal foam is used in the cathode side. With the decrease of RH, the critical flooding time was gradually postponed. This finding is especially useful for the practical applications of metal foam as flow distributor in a PEMFC.

由于消除了传统双极板的“陆/槽”几何形状，金属泡沫作为质子交换膜燃料电池（PEMFC）中的流量分配器在改善反应物均匀性和温度分布方面显示出巨大潜力，这对性能有好处增强燃料电池。但是，尚未考虑可以优化以进一步增强PEMFC性能的金属泡沫的布置。在研究中，镍金属泡沫被用作实验研究的新型流场，并与PEMFC中常规石墨平行流场的性能（案例1）进行了比较。关于金属泡沫的布置，三种情况，即在阳极侧（壳体2）或阴极侧（壳体3）中使用金属泡沫，并设计了在两侧同时使用金属泡沫的情况（案例4）。实验结果表明，镍泡沫金属的流场可使膜的温度分布更加均匀，有利于膜的耐久性，提高了燃料利用率。通过与全湿条件下的情况1进行比较，情况2的最大功率密度增加了15.67％，高于情况3（6.36％）和情况4（9.09％），表明金属泡沫布置的重要性。解释是，当相对湿度（RH）高时，使用镍泡沫金属流场的阴极侧更容易溢流。此外，对情况1-4进行的3小时恒流测试表明，在RH = 1时 当在阴极侧使用镍金属泡沫时，在105分钟后观察到严重的电压劣化。随着相对湿度的降低，临界驱油时间逐渐推迟。该发现对于在PEMFC中作为泡沫分配器的金属泡沫的实际应用特别有用。