In this work, the influences of various operating conditions including cathode inlet gas flow rate, cathode inlet humidification temperature, cell temperature, etc. on the performance of proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells with conventional flow field and interdigitated flow field are experimentally studied. Experimental results show that the cell performance is enhanced with increases in cathode inlet gas flow rate, cathode humidification temperature and cell temperature. However, as cell temperature is higher than or equal to anode humidification temperature, the cell performance is deteriorated due to failure in humidification of the cell. Comparison between interdigitated flow field and conventional flow field shows that the former provides higher cell performance and remarkably reduces fuel consumption for efficient diffusion of the fuel gas to the diffuser layer. As air is used as the cathode inlet gas, PEM fuel cell with interdigitated flow field can obtain preferable limiting current density, and the optimal power is about 1.4 times as that of the cells with conventional flow field. Rib and shoulder areas are more advantageous to electrochemical reaction in interdigitated flow field; hence a large flow field area ratio degrades the better performance area and thus the cell performance. But too small flow field area ratio also deteriorates the cell performance due to the decrease in effective reaction area. Theoretically, the flow field area has an optimum value, i.e., 50.75% in this work, providing higher performance than 66.67%. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.