Numerical evaluation of oxide growth in metallic support microstructures of Solid Oxide Fuel Cells and its influence on mass transport

Metal-supported Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFCs) are developed as a durable and cost-effective alternative to the state-of-the-art cermet SOFCs. This novel technology offers new opportunities but also new challenges. One of them is corrosion of the metallic support, which will decrease the long-term performance of the SOFCs. In order to understand the implications of the corrosion on the mass-transport through the metallic support, a corrosion model is developed that is capable of determining the change of the porous microstructure due to oxide scale growth. The model is based on high-temperature corrosion theory, and the required model parameters can be retrieved by standard corrosion weight gain measurements. The microstructure is reconstructed from X-ray computed tomography, and converted into a computational grid. The influence of the changing microstructure on the fuel cell performance is evaluated by determining an effective diffusion coefficient and the equivalent electrical area specific resistance (ASR) due to diffusion over time. It is thus possible to assess the applicability (in terms of corrosion behaviour) of potential metallic supports without costly long-term experiments. In addition to that an analytical frame-work is proposed, which is capable of estimating the porosity, tortuosity and the corresponding ASR based on weight gain measurements.