Progress and Prospects in the Development of Metal Supported Proton Conducting Ceramics for Steam Electrolysis and Other Electrochemical Energy Conversion Devices

Kurzfassung

Technological development of proton conducting ceramic cell (PCC) manufacturing is in progress. Both high electrochemical performance and robustness in long term operation are crucial for practical devices. The metal-supported (MS) architecture is one of the promising alternatives to the state-of-the-art ceramic supported SOCs, due to its high tolerance towards thermal/redox cycling that are key features for flexible and reliable operation in high temperature fuel cell and electrolysis applications. Relying on the perovskite-type PCC electrolyte, whose refractory nature requires high sintering temperatures in the conventional chemical processing route, the challenge in MS-PCC manufacturing is to achieve a gas-tight electrolyte layer without degradation of the metal substrate. Our strategy is the multilayer implementation combining wet chemical processing of the functional fuel electrode in air below 1000°C and Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) techniques below 800 °C for the gas-tight electrolyte coating. PCCs are suitable for MS architecture, that can provide potentially high performances and high mechanical stability for a wide range of electrochemical applications. We are working on the MS-PCC development in different projects. In the project DAICHI (EIG CONCERT-Japan, BMBF/01DR18002), we started with Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) to manufacture the gas tight electrolyte layer and obtained the first working MS-PCC in steam electrolysis application [1]. The concept is transferred to scalable techniques in projects ARCADE (BMBF/03SF0580A) and 112CO2 (Horizon 2020/952219). We will present our progress in the development of MS-PCC and discuss on the prospects to manufacture large-scale robust PCC cells at reasonable costs for different electrochemical applications. [1] Haoyu Zheng, Feng Han, Noriko Sata, Matthias Riegraf, Amir Masoud Dayaghi, Truls Norby, Rémi Costa, Metal Supported Proton Conducting Ceramic Cell with Thin Film Electrolyte for Electrolysis Application, ECS Transactions, 103 (1), 693-700 (2021)