Effect of flow modes on operation characteristics of three‐dimensional non‐isothermal solid oxide fuel cell stack

Abstract

The three-dimensional non-isothermal model of anode-supported planar solid oxide fuel cell was established. In order to reduce the temperature rise of SOFC in the process of operation and improve the output performance of the stack, this paper studied and compared the operation of SOFC in four different flow modes. The study found that the flow mode has a great influence on the temperature distribution of the SOFC stack. In co-flow, the temperature increases continuously along the channel length. In the case that oxygen and hydrogen of each cell are in co-flow, by reversing the flow direction between adjacent cells, the temperature rise of the SOFC stack along the channel direction can be reduced by 26 K, which decreases from 41.2 K to about 15 K. At the same time, the output current density and power density of the SOFC stack are also improved to some extent.

Design and in-depth investigation of SOFC with a novel flow-mode based on cross-flow

“…While FARDADI [15] et al reversed the flow direction of air and fuel within the layers on the basis of cross-flow arrangement. The temperature distribution of the cell was improved, but some loss of power density was also observed, which is slightly different from the results of FAN [16] et al They applied the combination of inter-and intralayer inversion in an arrangement to a three-layer stack model, and found that the power density was improved to a certain extent. However, some of the above studies on new flow patterns only focus on the temperature change and ignore the power density [12][13][14] , while others draw contradictory conclusions on the change of power density and do not discuss the underlying reasons [15,16] .…”