Hwa-Young Jung

Microstructural Characterization of Composite Electrode Materials in Solid Oxide Fuel Cells via Image Processing Analysis

Among various fuel cells, solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) offer the highest energy efficiency, when taking into account the thermal recycling of waste heat at high temperature. However, the highest efficiency and lowest pollution for a SOFC can be achieved through the sophisticated control of its constituent components such as electrodes, electrolytes, interconnects and sealing materials. The electrochemical conversion efficiency of a SOFC is particularly dependent upon the performance of its electrode materials. The electrode materials should meet highly stringent requirements to optimize cell performance. In particular, both mass and charge transport should easily occur simultaneously through the electrode structure. Matter transport or charge transport is critically related to the configuration and spatial disposition of the three constituent phases of a composite electrode, which are the ionic conducting phase, electronic conducting phase, and the pores. The current work places special emphasis on the quantification of this complex microstructure of composite electrodes. Digitized images are exploited in order to obtain the quantitative microstructural information, i.e., the size distributions and interconnectivities of each constituent component. This work reports regarding zirconia-based composite electrodes.

Comparison of the Power Generating Characteristics of KIST- and FZ-Julich SOFCs

We evaluate and compare the power generating characteristics of the anode supported SOFCs which have been fabricated from KIST and FZ-Julich in Germany. The performance and electrochemical property of each unit cell was characterized at the temperature range of 650-850℃ under same operating conditions and its microstructural property was thoroughly investigated via SEM after the performance test. According to the investigation, KIST- and FZJ SOFC showed different power generating characteristics in their temperature dependances due to their different design of electrode microstructure, especially the cathode microstructure. FZJ SOFC showed better performance at high temperature while showed lower performance at lower temperature. From the investigation about the correlation between microstructure and electrochemical property, we found that the superior performance of FZJ SOFC at high temperature was mainly due to its lower cathodic polarization resistance whereas better performance of KIST SOFC at lower temperature was mostly attributed to the lower ohmic resistance.