260
Automated SOFC Design Exploration

Thursday, 27 July 2017: 15:20
Atlantic Ballroom 1/2 (The Diplomat Beach Resort)
C. A. Lueth (Siemens PLM Software) and C. F. Walchshofer (Siemens Industry Software GmbH)
Fuel cells are a clean alternative to internal combustion engines and many experts consider them to be the future of ground-transportation. Solid oxide fuel cells are already heavily used in Japan for clean energy grid storage applications. Unlike combustion of hydrogen and oxygen that only generates heat, electrochemical reactions of hydrogen and oxygen may be separated to harness ion and electron transport for high efficiency energy conversion.

We present computer automated engineering of fuel cell stack design to maximize power production and minimize energy losses. Validated cell models are applied to 3-D stack simulations, where optimization algorithms obtain better designs, faster. Each simulation conserves flow, energy, species, and charge transport using efficient sparse segregated solvers. Automated workflows and state-of-the-art search algorithms allow for fast design space exploration of fuel cell material properties, dimensions, and boundary conditions.

Bibliography

[1]

O. R. J. G. a. J. M. V. Costa-Nunes, "Comparison of the performance of Cu–CeO 2–YSZ and Ni–YSZ composite SOFC anodes with H 2, CO, and syngas," Journal of power sources, vol. 141, no. 2, pp. 241-249, 2005.

[2]

F. Scholz, "Thermodynamics of electrochemical reactions," Electroanalytical Methods. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 11-31, 2010.

[3]

A. D. S. B. B. a. J. G. P. Le, "Validation of a Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Model on the International Energy Agency Benchmark Case with Hydrogen Fuel," Fuel Cells, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 27-41, 2015.

[4]

S. G. Bratsch, "Standard electrode potentials and temperature coefficients in water at 298.15 K," Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data , vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 1-21, 1989.

Figure 1: In solid oxide fuel cells, hydrogen fuel diffusing through the porous anode (left) reacts with oxygen ions traveling across the electrolyte membrane separator (middle) and produce electrons conducting through the solid porous cathode (right). Power is generated by flow of electrons from anode through an external circuit to the cathode (top), where they recombine with oxygen, in the air feed diffusing through the porous cathode, to repopulate membrane oxygen ions.