Fabrication and performance evaluation of planar solid oxide fuel cell with large active reaction area

Anode-supported planar solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) with dimension from 5 × 5 cm2 to 15 × 15 cm2 have been successfully fabricated by tape casting, screen-printing and single-step co-firing technologies, which shows a potential way of cost-effective for mass production. The performance of the cells has been investigated at operating temperature between 650 °C and 750 °C. The typical cell with dimension of 10 × 10 cm2 (active reaction area of 9 × 9 cm2) obtained open circuit voltage (OCV) of 1.15 V and power density of 770 mW/cm2 at current density of 950 mA/cm2 at 750 °C. The performance degradation of the cell is lower than 1.56%/1000 h. When external reformed methane gas was used as fuel, the cell showed no obvious performance decrease compared to that using pure hydrogen as fuel. The test results have demonstrated that the as-prepared large size cells have excellent performance and reliability, which is ready for SOFC stack assembly.