Metal supported protonic ceramic cells – an attractive architecture for high stability, cost/energy reduction and minimal CRM utilization

Abstract

Having fast proton transport in the temperature range around 400-600 °C, Protonic Ceramic Cells (PCC) offer variety of attractive applications for electrochemical energy conversion devices, from fuel cells, steam electrolysis to valuable chemical synthesis utilizing renewable resources and wastes. PCC electrolyte candidates have been intensively studied in the last decades, from which Ba(Zr,Ce)O3-δ based perovskites are focused on to develop PCCs. One of the difficulties in the cell processing is the refractory nature of the perovskites requiring high sintering temperatures over 1400 °C. This makes upscaling PCCs by industrial technologies challenging and so far planar PCCs in conventional ceramic supported architecture are not commercially available unlike the solid oxide cells. As an alternative architecture, Metal Supported (MS) ceramic cells are proposed. The high robustness of MS architecture under redox and thermal cycling has been successfully demonstrated for solid oxide fuel cells. The advantages of MS architecture, the mechanical stabilities as well as reduction of the cost and ceramic materials, stack integration and scalability, are very attractive also for PCCs. The key issues are the component materials and the scalable technologies. Finding good material combination is important that would allow high performance and mitigate the risk of cell degradation. Appropriate microstructures as well as electrochemical properties for the component layers should be achieved by the process technologies. In this presentation, strategies, challenges and perspectives for MS-PCC development will be discussed.