Thermal aging stability of infiltrated solid oxide fuel cell electrode microstructures: A three-dimensional kinetic Monte Carlo simulation

Nanostructured electrodes are widely used for low temperature solid oxide fuel cells, due to their remarkably high activity. However, the industrial applications of the infiltrated electrodes are hindered by the durability issues, such as the microstructure stability against thermal aging. Few strategies are available to overcome this challenge due to the limited knowledge about the coarsening kinetics of the infiltrated electrodes and how the potentially important factors affect the stability. In this work, the generic thermal aging kinetics of the three-dimensional microstructures of the infiltrate electrodes is investigated by a kinetic Monte Carlo simulation model considering surface diffusion mechanism. Effects of temperature, infiltration loading, wettability, and electrode configuration are studied and the key geometric parameters are calculated such as the infiltrate particle size, the total and percolated quantities of three-phase boundary length and infiltrate surface area, and the tortuosity factor of infiltrate network. Through parametric study, several strategies to improve the thermal aging stability are proposed.