High performance anode with dendritic porous structure for low temperature solid oxide fuel cells

A dendritic porous supported microstructure simultaneously creates small pore size and broad gas diffusion pathways in a solid oxide fuel cell anode membrane. This microstructure also achieves pore sizes that reduce with increasing depth within the membrane without increasing the structure tortuosity. Such a microstructure supplies high triple phase boundary density, fast gas diffusion and low polarization resistance. Here we characterise the performance of a porous anode with such a dendritic microstructure. The solid oxide fuel cell with this high performance anode achieved 0.92 W cm−2 power density at 600 °C.