Additive Manufacturing of Large Area SOC with Advanced Features

Abstract

The incorporation of electrochemical-based energy devices such as Solid Oxide Cells (SOC) to the renewable energy sector in the frame of a modern energy generation strategy could be beneficial, taking into account the opportunity to store renewable energy overproduction as hydrogen (SOEC operation mode) as well as to use, subsequently, this hydrogen as a fuel for energy generation in the same device (SOFC operation mode).Nowadays, the common-used SOC manufacturing approaches, in most cases, meet the limits originated by the capabilities of the techniques to produce the ceramic components with more complicated geometries, in respect to planar or tubular shapes. To overcome these constrains, the additive manufacturing (AM), commonly referred as 3D Printing, could be applied for the production of the SOC-based devices with enhanced features.The use of AM allows a high degree of design freedom and opens a wide field for fabrication of functional ceramics with high resolution of herarchical geometries, optimized through computational elements by CAD design and stereolithographic (SLA)ceramic printing. At the same time the AM, specifically the SLA in this work, allows the simplification of the whole SOC manufacturing process making it tunable in geometry and size opening a new trend for fabrication of large area SOC with enhanced features in terms of active area or other functionalities. In a more effective way in terms of time, cost and waste material reduction.The enhancement of the performance of the SOC device has been proved due to the increase of the active area by the production of complex shaped electrolytes using the 3D Printing process. To demonstrate,its scalability, large area 3YSZ electrolytes (~60-70 cm2) with the advanced geometries were fabricated by stereolithography three-dimensional printer, to be implemented as an electrolyte-supported cell using YSZ composites with lanthanum strontium manganite (LSM) as a cathode and nickel composites as an anode, i.e. Ni-YSZ/3YSZ/LSM-YSZ.