(Invited) Energy Materials Development at Ceres: From Nanometers to Megawatts

Abstract

Ceres’ unique metal supported SteelCell® SOC technology is increasingly establishing itself as the global standard for SOC, combining robustness, efficiency and low manufacturing cost. The technology is rapidly moving from demonstration to true volume production, with Robert Bosch GmbH in Germany and Doosan Fuel Cell in South Korea both having licenses to manufacture Ceres SteelCell® cells and stacks at the hundreds of MW per year scale with factories under construction. Ceres acts as design authority to licensees who manufacture Ceres-developed technology at scale. As such Ceres specifies the raw materials required for cell manufacture and has ultimate responsibility for the validation of any new suppliers of raw materials proposed by licensees.In addition to supporting the high-volume scale up of current generations of SteelCell technology, Ceres has an extensive R&D program to develop future technology generations which offer improved performance, lower cost and/or lower degradation. A very detailed understanding of the behavior of the materials used in cells, stacks and systems is required to enable future optimization and/or the development of novel materials. This particularly includes the challenges of understanding degradation phenomena, which due to the extended timescales involved are poorly characterized in academic literature. To enhance this understanding Ceres has a number of academic collaborations, most notably with Imperial College London to use leading-edge experimental and computational techniques to understand material behavior affecting initial performance, degradation (particularly changes at interfaces) and corrosion of metallic components. Information gained from these collaborations is used to enable reliable lifetime prediction for current-generation stacks and systems to be undertaken using computer models to predict performance through-life using degradation models derived from theoretical understanding. Theoretical understanding of materials behavior also drives innovation in new generations of materials offering enhanced performance and/or durability, enabling Ceres to maintain its competitive advantage in SOC technology.