Intermediate Temperature Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (IT-SOFC) technology offers interesting opportunities in the panorama of a larger penetration of renewable and distributed power generation, namely high electrical efficiency at manageable scales for both remote and industrial applications. In order to optimize the performance and the operating conditions of such a pre-commercial technology, an effective synergy between experimentation and simulation is fundamental. For this purpose, starting from the SIMFC (SIMulation of Fuel Cells) code set-up and successfully validated for Molten Carbonate Fuel Cells, a new version of the code has been developed for IT-SOFCs. The new release of the code allows the calculation of the maps of the main electrical, chemical, and physical parameters on the cell plane of planar IT-SOFCs fed in co-flow. A semi-empirical kinetic formulation has been set-up, identifying the related parameters thanks to a devoted series of experiments, and integrated in SIMFC. Thanks to a multi-sampling innovative experimental apparatus the simultaneous measurement of temperature and gas composition on the cell plane was possible, so that a preliminary validation of the model on local values was carried out. A good agreement between experimental and simulated data was achieved in terms of cell voltages and local temperatures, but also, for the first time, in terms of local concentration on the cell plane, encouraging further developments. This numerical tool is proposed for a better interpretation of the phenomena occurring in IT-SOFCs and a consequential optimization of their performance.

No abstract

No abstract

The distributed relaxation times (DRT) method has been employed in order to deconvolute the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurements carried out on a Ni-YSZ|YSZ|Pr 2 NiO 4+δ-GDC solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC). This has enabled to shed light on the diverse physicochemical processes occurring within the aforementioned cell by individuating the characteristic relaxation times of these by means of a specifically designed experimental campaign where temperature and gas compositions in anode and cathode were varied one at a time. A comprehensive equivalent circuit model (ECM) has thus been generated based on the processes observed in the DRT spectra. This ECM has proved to be instrumental for the obtainment of parameters which describe the microstructural and electrochemical properties of the SOFC when used contemporaneously with experimental results and modelling theory (described in Part II of this work).