Effect of catalyst layer configuration on single chamber solid oxide fuel cell performance

• Performance analysis of three different SCSOFC catalyst layer configurations is done.
• The ohmic loss plays a key factor in performance enhancement.
• Stacking the perpendicular configuration cell enhances the SCSOFC performance.

The purpose of the current study is to numerically evaluate the effect of coplanar and perpendicular catalyst layer configurations on the performance of a single chamber solid oxide fuel cell (SC-SOFC). Three different catalyst layer configurations, coplanar, single-cell perpendicular and two-cell stack are used. Fuel is a mixture of hydrogen and air (50% hydrogen and 50% air by volume). An in-house computational fluid dynamics code is utilized to solve the nonlinear governing equations of mass, momentum, energy, charge balance and gas-phase species coupled with kinetics equations. Results show that the perpendicular catalyst layer configuration is more suitable for SC-SOFC than the coplanar configuration. This is due to shorter path of the oxygen ion transportation from cathode to anode in perpendicular compared to coplanar configuration. In addition, results indicate that adding another anode and cathode electrode on the other face of the electrolyte and providing a simple two-cell stack improve the cell performance. Finally, in order to present a suitable configuration of a SCSOFC two-cell stack, a parametric study is performed.