Modeling Intermediate Temperature Protonic Ceramic Fuel Cells

Abstract

Protonic ceramic fuel cells (PCFC) have emerged as a promising candidate for distributed power generation and synthetic fuel production. The cells offer the potential for reduced temperature operation (~500oC), which enables faster startup times, longer life, and lower material cost components to be used compared to their oxygen ion conducting counterparts. The development of a new protonic ceramic fuel cell computational modeling framework is presented for a predictive cell-level, interface charge transfer PCFC model capturing the mixed conducting nature of the protonic ceramic materials. The model employs a 1-D channel-level modeling strategy where fuel depletion and flow configuration effects are resolved and coupled to a semi-empirical electrochemical model. Modeling results calibrated against experimental data of a state-of-the-art PCFC composition are presented. The model is capable of simulating a fuel flexible PCFC where methane and steam without pre-reforming are fed directly into the anode gas channel.