Nanostructured ruthenium – gadolinia-doped ceria composite anodes for thin film solid oxide fuel cells

Porous La0.6Sr0.4CoO3−δ thin film cathodes for large area micro solid oxide fuel cell power generators

“…This last phenomenon leads to the agglomeration of the metal during operation yielding the formation of isolated metallic islands, with the loss of in-plane percolation and/or dramatic reduction of active area. Fast degradation of metallic thin films implemented on µSOFC configurations have been already reported by Ramanathan et al [4,13,18].…”

Solid-oxide fuel cells

“…However, when formed as very thin films, metals present serious issues of de-wetting and agglomeration and sintering of the particles, with consequent gradual reduction of the active sites (TPB) and consequent degradation of performance (Galinski et al, 2010;Ryll et al, 2011). This microstructural instability has been observed in several metals and it is controlled by mass-diffusion mechanisms, which are fast for metals at the LT-SOFC operation temperatures (T < 500 C) (Kerman et al, 2011a;Takagi, Adam, & Ramanathan, 2012;Tsuchiya et al, 2011). Since the driving forces in coarsening and sintering depend on the energy at the surface of the materials, these effects became even more critical in nanoparticles and nano-porous layers, where the specific area is very high.…”

“…Here, the most studied material is nickel plus either CGO or YSZ Noh et al, 2010). As alternatives, RueCGO for LT-SOFC anodes was also reported (Takagi et al, 2012). In all the cases, the main difficulty is related to the fast degradation of the anode, associated with the agglomeration of the metal.…”

A thermally self-sustained micro-power plant with integrated micro-solid oxide fuel cells, micro-reformer and functional micro-fluidic carrier

“…Considerably higher power densities are expected in case more stable electrodes are used that do not show agglomeration as well as the instability is prevented [20,44,45]. Also, different electrode materials than pure Pt are promising, whereby most of them are based on metals [12,21,25,45,46] and metal-ceramic composites [17,25,27,[47][48][49]. Pure ceramic electrodes [25,[50][51][52][53][54][55] show also encouraging results.…”

“…Their power densities were measured in an external furnace or on a hot plate with pure hydrogen or hydrogen diluted with inert gases as fuel. A few publications report about anodes based on Pt, Pd or Ru, which were tested in fuels consisting of methane or a methane-air mixture reformed in situ on the anodes [17][18][19][20][21].…”