Performance analysis of single cell solid oxide fuel cells

Abstract

Abstract—Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) are a class of fuel cells operating on high temperatures which have the potential to become one of the efficient and cost effective system for direct conversion of a wide variety of fuels to electricity. For proper operation of SOFCs, evaluation of cell stability and optimization of fuel utilization is of paramount importance. In this paper, we have performed experiments to obtain currentvoltage (I-V) characteristics by using three different Hydrogen (H2) flow rates(100 ml=min; 150 ml=min and 200 ml=min). Furthermore, we perform oxidation and reduction (redox) cycles to determine how many redox cycles a SOFC can withstand without cracking the cell which we called as redox stability. With our experimental results, it is evident that the H2 flow rate needs to be optimized to have higher cell performance.