In this work, the main theme is to study the effects of electrode fabrication processes and material parameters on cell performance of PEM fuel cell. Adding a micro porous layer to traditional gas diffusion layer (GDL) can enhance the ability of water management, and therefore achieve better cell performance and higher limiting current density. For the effects of fluorinated ethylene propylene (FEP), either too high or too low content will deteriorate the performance of fuel cells. If the FEP content in the GDL is too high, indicating the GDL with a quite small pore size, the fuel gas will be difficult to diffuse in the GDL. If the content is too low, the water generated in the cell cannot be effectively removed. It is disclosed by the present experiments that when using air as cathode oxidant at an operating voltage above 0.6V, the best performance can be achieved by using a GDL with 10% FEP content in the carbon paper and 20% content in the micro porous layer. The Vulcan XC-72R carbon loading of 1 mg/cm(2) in the micro porous layer is sufficiently high to obtain the maximum performance. (c) 2007 International Association for Hydrogen Energy. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.