Non-crystallising glass sealants for SOFC: Effect of Y2O3 addition

Abstract

The joining of ceramic and metal (interconnect) parts is one of the main challenges in the development of solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC). A promising approach to solving this problem is the use of glassy sealants. In this work, we investigated the effect of yttria additions on the properties of SiO2–Al2O3–CaO–Na2O–ZrO2–Y2O3 glass sealants. An increase in the concentration of yttria is shown to reduce the tendency of the glasses under study to crystallisation. A glass containing 4 wt% of Y2O3 is found to be amorphous, even after exposure at 850 °C for 100 h. Moreover, the defectiveness of the glass microstructure, after sealing, is found to decrease along with a growth in the Y2O3 concentration. The developed non-crystallising sealant was successfully applied for joining a YSZ ceramic and an Fe–Ni–Co alloy having the phase transition of around 500 °C. The use of the non-crystallising sealant allows us to join materials with very different thermal expansion coefficients and to avoid cracking under cooling, which might occur due to a large difference in thermal expansion coefficients.