Size dependence of warpage in solid oxide fuel cell

Planar anode-supported solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) typically show curvature behavior. The cell is warped due to the mismatch in the properties of the cell layers during fabrication process. Scaling up anode supported cells for industrial and commercial applications increases the warpage due to geometrical consideration. In this work, the curvature radius and maximum deflection of small cells are compared to large cells to gain a better insight into the warpage behavior in the scaling up process. The obtained results show that the curvature radius significantly increases by increasing cell size, whereas with respect to geometrical consideration, scaling up should result in no radius change. Also, the interaction between cell size and applied load (during sintering) has been investigated. The curvature radius generally increases with increasing total load density and cell size. The influence of total load density decreases for the large cells and the influence of cell size decreases with increasing total load density. Furthermore, an expression is proposed for the estimation of the curvature radius in the scaling up process by taking into account the effect of size and applied load and interaction between them.