Influences of the processes on the microstructures and properties of the plasma sprayed IT-SOFC anode

By using the atmospheric plasma spraying (APS) technique for SOFC fabrication, we can avoid the thermal failure between the components of SOFC which made from the traditional sintering method at high temperature. The advantage of porous metal supported SOFC produced by the APS process is that the process is simple and low cost. The purpose of this study was to manufacture a porous Ni/CeO2 anode of intermediate temperature SOFC. By introducing the pore former into the feedstocks, the porous structure of the Ni/CeO2 anode was obtained by plasma spraying method. In this study, the feedstock of the NiO/CeO2/Na2CO3 powder made by the spray granulation is spherical; the powder structure is compact and a hollow hole inside the powder, hence more porosity (29.1%) of the as-sprayed coating was found and the pore distribution is more uniform. The remainder oxygen vacancies are existed in the reduced anode coating. Use of undoped ceria as an anode material appears to be feasible. The NiO/CeO2/Na2CO3 powder formed the higher bonding strength coating with 33.6 MPa. The electron conductivity was obtained with around 200 S/cm in 700 °C. The other properties of the anode were discussed in the paper.