News
Seminar Series
February 15, 2008 EMB 105 |
Kyung Joong Yoon Single Step Co-Firing Technique for Manufacturing High Performance Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFCs) Host Program: Department of Manufacturing Engineering |
| Abstract: Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) represent one of the most environmentally clean and versatile means of efficiently converting chemical energy to electrical energy from a wide variety of fuels. At present, one of the major obstacles for the commercialization of SOFC power systems is their high manufacturing costs expressed in terms of SOFC system cost per unit power ($/kW). Conventional SOFC fabrication technologies involve multiple sintering steps for a single cell fabrication, and the sintering step is one of the most expensive processes during cell fabrication. Therefore, reducing the number of sintering steps in SOFC fabrication process can greatly lower the manufacturing costs. In the present work, anode-supported planar SOFCs were successfully fabricated by a single step co-firing process. The cells were comprised of a porous Ni + yittria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) anode support, a porous-fine-grained Ni + YSZ anode active layer for some experiments, a dense YSZ electrolyte, a porous-fine-grained Ca-doped LaMnO3 (LCM) + YSZ cathode active layer, and a porous LCM cathode current collector layer, all applied using inexpensive application methods. The cell fabrication methods and the performance of the cells which are comparable to state-of-the-art cells fabricated by more complex and expensive techniques is discussed. |
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