STATE OF THE ART SOFC COMPONENT DEVELOPMENT AT ECN

摘要

ECN has been developing components for the flat plate SOFC since 1989 and currently works in close collaboration with two major European SOFC stack and system developers, Siemens AG and Sulzer HEXIS Ltd. ECN has a SOFC cell manufacturing facility in which tape-casting and screen printing techniques are used to manufacture cells with dimensions of up to 10 × 10 cm and 12 cm diameter on a routine basis. Scale-up of cell size to 20 × 20 cm~2 and 20 cm diameter has also been demonstrated. The emphasis at ECN is on improving the durability as well as reducing the manufacturing costs of the state of the art cell components. An important part of this development work is long term testing under realistic stack operating conditions and using methane / steam mixtures as fuel in order to further develop ceramic components suitable for use in simplified direct internal reforming SOFC systems.