Reactive Spray Deposition Technology – An one-step deposition technique for Solid Oxide Fuel Cell barrier layers

In order to reduce the cost of the manufacturing of Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFC), and to enable metal supported cell fabrication, a new fabrication method called Reactive Spray Deposition Technology (RSDT) for direct deposition of the material onto ceramic or metal support for low temperature SOFC is currently being developed. The present work describes the effect on the performance of a SOFC when a Gd0.2Ce0.8O1.9 (GDC) layer has been introduced as diffusion barrier layer between the yttria stabilized zirconia (YSZ) electrolyte and the La0.6Sr0.4CoO3−δ (LSC) cathode. The dense, thin and fully crystalline GDC films were directly applied by RSDT, without any post-deposition heating or sintering step. The quality of the film and performance of the cell prepared by RSDT was compared to a GDC blocking layer deposited by screen printing (SP) and then sintered. The observed ohmic resistance of the ASC with a GDC layer deposited by RSDT is 0.24 Ω cm2, which is close to the expected theoretical value of 0.17 Ω cm2 for a 5-μm thick 8 mol% yttria YSZ (8YSZ) electrolyte at 873 K.