Sunfire commercially distributes products for various markets (SOFC, SOEC and Co-SOEC) with its stack and system technology. To achieve an ideal tradeoff between cost, performance, and degradation for its customers, Sunfire’s stack design is continuously being improved. In this publication, latest results that resulted in a decrease of the combined life cycle costs (€ kW-1 h-1) of approx. 40% and cost projections for large scale production will be presented. Furthermore, recent changes in automation and industrial scale-up that lead to a current annual production volume of >10MW and next steps to further increase this value will be shown. Last but not least, updates on the recent development for Sunfire’s products Home, Remote and Hylink/Synlink will be given.
In the past years, sunfire has increased its product portfolio and production depth. Four product classes (single stacks and stack modules for SOFC and SOEC) are tackling several markets (offgrid, on-grid, mobile). A ceramic center and a new production facility were inaugurated. The R&D activities are strongly driven by market requirements. With the new SOC stack electrolysis operation is introduced aside fuel cell operation. Furthermore, an increase in power density and a reduction of cost was achieved under the constraint of using standard industrial materials. Latest results of SOC single stack testing like I-V curves and reversible operation will be presented. The engineering and testing of stack modules in the power range >25 kW will be also shown. Company PortraitStarting to produce fuel cell stacks by 2006, sunfire established a vast experience of the SOFC technology. Besides the continuous economic growth, the last years led to a focus shift onto a new field of application, combining SOFC and SOEC into a universal -so called SOC stack which is capable of both transforming chemical energy into electrical energy and vice versa. Market demand shows, that besides the "classic" SOFC fields of application like remote and mobile power generation e.g. in automotive, ships or at pipeline control stations, the SOC addresses the need for electricity storage and fluctuation buffering which came up with the fast rise of sustainable energy production in industrial countries. Acting as an electrolyser when there is an oversupply of wind-or solar power, the SOC turns electrical energy into chemically bound energy in the form of H 2 , which can be stored in almost unlimited amounts. In the moment the electricity demand exceeds the supply, SOC is turned from electrolyser to fuel cell mode and converts the gas bound energy back to electricity. Recently there are plenty of requests of multinational companies that want to include SOC products into their portfolio. Hereby, sunfire can act as a vendor of stacks, stack modules with already integrated gas supply or whole systems in the power range of one to several hundred kW. Recently, a company-owned pilot plant for a power-to-liquid process is put into operation. With the use of SOEC technology, the plant produces liquid fuels and other valuable products like highly purified and customized waxes for chemical industry.Besides the focus on R&D in both stack and integration topics, the development and optimization of production processes play a role with increasing importance for the company. As the stack production will exceed the number of 1000 stacks/a. in 2015, there is a tremendous potential for production automation, which will subsequently lead to 10.1149/06801.0125ecst ©The Electrochemical Society ECS Transactions, 68 (1) 125-129 (2015) 125 ) unless CC License in place (see abstract). ecsdl.org/site/terms_use address. Redistribution subject to ECS terms of use (see 155.69.4.4 Downloaded on 2015-08-23 to IP
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