Thermo-electrochemical and thermal stress analysis for an anode-supported SOFC cell

The main objective of this paper is to evaluate the fuel/oxidant gas distributions as well as thermal stresses of an anode-supported solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) test cell under different operating conditions. In this study, the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code Star-CD with es-sofc module is employed to simulate the current–voltage (I–V) characteristics and to provide the temperature field of the cell to the commercial code MARC for further thermal stress analysis. Structural and fluid elements are built by preprocessing codes PATRAN and GRIDGEN, respectively. The simulation results indicate that the cells experience higher principal stresses at lower cell voltages due to a higher local current density and a higher temperature gradient.