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The Effect of Electrode Morphology on Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Performance
Three different morphologies are generated from three different starting powders, spheres representing non aggregated powders, agglomerates of spheres and high aspect ratio cylinders modelling splats formed in plasma sprays. Of particular interest in this study is the effect of anisotropy of the base particles on the resulting electrode.
For each base particle shape multiple stochastic realizations of densely packed particle systems are generated using a collective rearrangement algorithm. The structures are then analysed geometrically with methods from spatial statistics using our own Java-based software, and meshed, solved and analysed with respect to transport and performance using a custom modified version of the open source computational fluid dynamics package, openFOAM. Detailed comparisons are presented in terms of tortuosity of paths through each phase of the material, constrictivity and chord lengths in different directions, directional transport properties in each of the three phases, distribution of the triple phase boundary lines and electrode performance