Analysing tortuosity for solid oxide fuel cell anode material : experiments and modeling
Date
19/09/2023Author
Grant ID
ep/l017008/1
EP/R023751/1
EP/T019298/1
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) directly convert chemical energy to electricity with high electrical efficiency. It involves gas transport through the porous electrode to the three-phase boundaries (TPB). The tortuosity of gas transport relates the bulk diffusion of gas in free space to the effective diffusion coefficient of gas migrating through a porous material. Therefore, determining the tortuosity is of great importance. This paper tests button SOFCs with NiO-YSZ as anode material followed by dual beam-focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) to obtain 2D serial slice images. Based on processed 2D images and reconstructed 3D microstructure, the tortuosity is calculated using three approaches i.e., porosity-tortuosity correlations, voxel-based, and path-length-based approaches. The test results show that a decrease in Ni content in the anode greatly decreases the cell performance due to a decreased percolated electronic phase. The sample with low performance has high tortuosity. Different approaches vary regarding the tortuosity value and computational time. The path-length-based approach can achieve reasonable accuracy in a relatively short time but is only valid for using the longest path length.
Citation
Zhang , X , Yang , D , Xu , M , Naden , A , Espinoza-Andaluz , M , Li , T , Irvine , J T S & Andersson , M 2023 , ' Analysing tortuosity for solid oxide fuel cell anode material : experiments and modeling ' , Journal of The Electrochemical Society , vol. 170 , no. 9 . https://doi.org/10.1149/1945-7111/acf884
Publication
Journal of The Electrochemical Society
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0013-4651Type
Journal article
Description
X. Q. Zhang acknowledges the Chinese Scholarship Council (grant number: 201906070189). Great appreciation also from X. Q. Zhang and M. Andersson to the Royal Physiographic Society in Lund for sponsoring a 6 month research stay in the JTSI group at the School of Chemistry at the University of St. Andrews. A.B.N. and J.T.S.I. gratefully acknowledge support from the ESPRC through grants EP/L017008/1, EP/R023751/1 and EP/T019298/1.Collections
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