“…In both cases, the individual constituent layers experience substantially different shrinkage rates, resulting in a variety of microstructural heterogeneities and the consequent performance degradation of solid oxide fuel cells at the level of both individual cells and stacks. Therefore, it is important to understand the effect of constrained sintering on microstructure evolution in both multiphase composite components themselves, as well as in cells, particularly from the viewpoint of flaw generation during fabrication and the subsequent structural damages and/or failure during operation [6,7,18,19,20,21,22,23,24]. In SOFC development, it has been acknowledged that constrained sintering generally leads to inadequate film density and unfavorable pore structures [25] and, to address this issue, research efforts have been devoted to understanding the microstructure evolution, stress development and defect formation based on experimental and theoretical approaches [26,27,28,29,30].…”