Determination of the effective conductivities of solid oxide fuel cell electrodes using the first‐order homogenization method

Abstract

Approximately 80% of the world's primary energy supply consists of fossil fuels. In order to reduce the CO2 consumption in the world, fuel cells will be indispensable for the environmentally friendly generation of electrical energy. Many experimental and numerical studies show that the composition and the microstructure morphology of porous electrodes have a great influence on the durability and conversion efficiency of fuel cells. In order to establish a relationship between the specific microstructure of the electrodes and the performance of the overall fuel cell, the macroscopic physical quantities need to be determined. In this work, the first‐order computational homogenization method capable of capturing anisotropic effects is applied in order to estimate different types of homogenized conductivities. The effective conductivities can be used to conduct numerical simulations on the fuel cell level in order to obtain correlations between the microstructure characteristics (e.g., volume fraction of pores, morphology) and the performance.