Towards High Power Density Metal Supported Solid Oxide Fuel Cell for Mobile Applications

Abstract

For use of metal supported solid oxide fuel cell (MS-SOFC) in mobile applications it is important to reduce the thermal mass to enable fast startup, increase stack power density in terms of weight and volume and reduce costs. In the present study, we report on the effect of reducing the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) SoA MS-SOFCs support layer thickness from 313 μm gradually to 108 μm. The support layer thickness decrease in the DTU co-sintering MS-SOFC fabrication route results in an increased densification of the support layer and a slight decrease in performance. To mitigate the performance loss, two different routes for increasing the porosity of the support layer and thus performance were explored. The first route is the introduction of gas channels by puncturing of the green tape casted support layer. The second route is modification of the co-sintering profile. In summary, the cell thickness and thus weight and volume was reduced and the cell power density at 0.7 V at 700°C was increased by 46% to 1.01 Wcm−2 at a fuel utilization of 48%. All modifications were performed on a stack technological relevant cell size of 12 cm × 12 cm.