A CASE STUDY OF USING ENHANCED INTERCONNECT CHANNEL GEOMETRIES ON HEAT AND MASS TRANSFER CHARACTERISTICS OF ANODE-SUPPORTED PLANAR SOFC

摘要

The role of enhanced heat transfer inside interconnect channels for improved convective cooling and thermal management of planar solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) is investigated. A case study of two different geometries (sinusoidal wavy or corrugated walls and offset-and-interrupted walls) is presented for a uniform electrochemical reaction rate with constant flow of moist hydrogen and air. The coupled heat and mass transfer is modeled by three-dimensional, steady-state equations for mass, momentum, energy, species transfer, and electrochemical kinetics, in which the porous-layer flow is in thermal equilibrium with the solid matrix and is coupled with the electrochemical reaction rate. The heat and mass transfer rates through the interconnect ducts as well as the electrodes on both the anode and cathode sides are computationally obtained. The temperature field and species mass distributions, along with variations in the friction factor and heat transfer coefficients describe the performance of the two flow-channel geometries. The relative thermal and hydrodynamic behavior is compared with that in plain rectangular-duct interconnects to evaluate their convective-cooling performance. The results demonstrate that the offset interrupted-wall geometry yields better cooling of the SOFC module.