Development of electrode and electrolyte materials for solid oxide fuel cells sofcs

Abstract

Currently, we are facing dual challenge caused by ever increasing energy demand and environmental pollution due to fossil fuel burning with consequent greenhouse effect. Thus the need to explore advanced energy conversion and storage technologies is the most demanding research area [Steele et al., 2001; Chu et al., 2012; Ding et al., 2014]. Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) are such kind of energy conversion devices, which transform chemical energy of fuel to electrical energy, with added advantages of high energy conversion efficiency, environmental compatibility and extensive fuel flexibility [Wachsman et al., 2011]. newlineAs a promising sustainable technology, solid oxide fuel cells are believed to be clean, highly efficient and environment-friendly alternative source of energy. In recent years, SOFCs have attracted extensive research interest among the existing fuel cell technologies due to their high efficiency, multi fuel compatibility, and low polluting emissions [Facci et al., 2017; Sun et al.,2017; Bi et al., 2017; Cebollero et al., 2017]. However, even with these advantages, a market development and commercialization of these devices have been mostly hindered by high operating temperature which brings several issues like fast material degradation and compatibility challenges in cell components [Steele et al., 2001; Jiang et al., 2008; Schrödl et al., 2015; Lee et al., 2010]. newlineThe traditional SOFCs mainly consist of a high oxide ion conducting electrolyte, mixed ionic-electronic conducting cathode and a porous anode. Use of expensive materials in cell components for high operating temperature range and associate high cell production cost poses major hindrance in commercialization of SOFC technology [Brett et al., 2008; Gao et al., 2016; Duan et al., 2015; Liu et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2017; Fan et al., 2018]. Solid electrolyte having high oxide ion conduction with low operating temperature is one of the main requirements for the commercialization of SOFCs.