Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFCs) are an electrochemical energy converter that receives the world's attention as a power generation system of the future owing to its flexibility to consume various types of fuels, low emission of greenhouses gases, and having high efficiency reaching over 70%. A conventional SOFCs operates at high temperature, typically ranges between 800 to 1000°C. SOFCs use yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) as the electrolyte, which exhibits excellent oxide ion conductivity in this temperature range. However, this temperature range poses an issue to SOFCs durability, as it leads to the degradation of the cell components. In addition, SOFCs application is limited and difficult to implement for the transportation sector and portable appliance. A viable solution is to lower the SOFCs operating temperature to intermediate (600 to 800°C ) or low (<600°C) operating temperature. The benefit of this way, cell durability will improve, as well as other advantages such as facilitates handling, assembling, dismantling, cost reduction, and expanded the SOFCs application. Nonetheless, the key challenge for the issue is finding suitable electrolyte, as YSZ have lower ionic conductivity at low and intermediate temperature range. The aim of this paper is to review the status and challenges in the attempts made to modify YSZ electrolyte within the past decade. The resulting ionic conductivity, microstructure, and densification, mechanical and thermal properties of these 'new' electrolytes critically reviewed. The targeted conductivity of modification of YSZ electrolyte must be exceeded >0.1 S cm -1 to enable high performance of SOFCs power generation systems to be realized for transportation and portable applications. Based on our knowledge, this paper is the first review which focused on the recent status and challenges of YSZ electrolyte towards lowering the operating temperature.
The solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) emerge as an alternative power generation system for high-scale stationary application and power plant station. The SOFC consumption leads to the high-efficiency energy production that forms variety of fuels up to 60% energy conversion; the operation system does not involve the burning process and minimizes the air pollution. Also, the aptitude to provide the cogenerative energy production from the heat waste during the operation process serve SOFC as an attractive green technology and environmentally friendly. However, the SOFC consumption remains limited for transportation and portable applications because the simple design of power source compartment is still the major hurdle in each SOFC component development and commercialization. Therefore, the appropriate fabrication method of each SOFC component is important to achieve the reliability of the SOFC application for the small-scale power generation design. In this paper, an overview of the design types and SOFC components and properties following electrode, electrolyte, interconnect and sealant are discussed and summarized. As the thirdgeneration fuel cells, which entice the commercialization stage, this paper concentrates more on the fabrication method of each SOFC components that were explored including the working principle, advantage, disadvantage and several previous works on each fabrication method, which are described to finding the appropriate fabrication method toward lowering the operating temperature and develop the simple design of SOFC power sources system for the transportation and portable application. The targeted market power production of SOFC system for transportation application is about 5 kW and 250 W for portable application.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.