High toughness well conducting contact layers for solid oxide cell stacks by reactive oxidative bonding

The increasing demand for large scale electrochemical conversion technologies, suppose a scale-up of the solid oxide cell (SOC) technologies. SOCs offer high conversion efficiency compared to competing technologies, but the brittleness of the ceramic components makes up-scaling a challenge, as these challenges grows with the size of the stack. Here, we present a new type of contact layer to be used between the oxygen electrode and the interconnect, which can be applied by a scalable, low-cost processing routes. The microstructural and compositional development of the contact layers was studied by X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy and the performance was evaluated by measuring the fracture toughness and area specific resistance. Five times higher toughness compared to conventional contact layers is achieved by reactive oxidative bonding at moderate temperatures. In this process metal particles (Cu, Co, Mn) are in-situ oxidized to well conductive spinels with low area specific resistance (