A NOVEL HIGH-VOLTAGE SINGLE-CHAMBER SOFC WITH SERIES CONNECTED CELLS I. OPERATING CHARACTERISTICS OF TWO-SEGMENTS CELL

摘要

A novel single chamber SOFC for generating elevated voltages is proposed. The system consists of conventional single cells used in single chamber SOFC and interconnections. The single cells are connected in series and placed in the direction of gas flow. This fuel cell was named as single chamber SOFC with series connected cells (abbreviated to SSSC). In this study, we deal with an analysis of the series connected segments which play an important role in the SSSC. In order to simplify the analysis, a single cell of SOFC is divided into two segments and the effect of the partition on the power generation characteristics is discussed. The result of the calculation for the two-segments cell revealed that the I-V and I-P characteristics of the cell are affected considerably by the ratio of the lengths of the segments. We obtained a maximum output power when the lengths of the segments are equal and hydrogen utilization is 68 %. The maximum power was higher than that of one-segment cell by 2.0 mW. When the utilization increases to 85 %, difference in output power between one-segment and two-segments cells increased to 5.2 mW.