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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BestinclassSOFCs (Enabling mass market adoption of SOFC fuel cell systems)

Teaser

Summary

Switching to cleaner energy production is one of the main priorities to decrease global warming process and to reduce CO2, NOx, nanoparticles and other types of pollutions due to old fossil fuels technologies. And solid oxide cell technology can be a solution for future energy industry thanks to extremely high electrical efficiency (74% has been reached with best-in-class Elcogenâ€™s product), fuel flexibility (natural gas, biogas, hydrogen, CO, different hydrocarbons etc.), reduced emissions (or even zero-emissions in case of pure hydrogen or ammonia as a fuel), and a possibility to operate in electrolysis (SOEC) or reversible mode (rSOC) to produce fuel and/or to store excess of energy.

One of the major barriers in adoption of fuel cell systems to the market is high price of cells. As solid oxide cell is the core of the technology, it should be very efficient and cheap to make SOC systems competitive. Having the most efficient industrially produced cells on the market, Elcogen aims to reduce the cost of single unit to less than â‚¬5 per cell. The project covers the whole development cycle, from technical development of each layer of cell and manufacturing process design and optimisation, to commercial plan and testing of new ready product with potential customers. As a result, 3rd generation cell design with improved mechanical and electrochemical properties using optimised manufacturing techniques will be developed and adopted by Elcogen to provide low-cost high efficiency solid oxide cells to system manufacturers.

Work performed

During the first reporting period of the project, the work was focused on four main development directions:

1) Development of thinner cell design.
The new cell generation will help not only to reduce cost of raw materials compared to the previous generations, but also to increase manufacturing speed. As result, thinner cell with optimised microstructure shows 40% reduction in raw materials, is more than 2 times stronger mechanically, and also has higher electrochemical performance with no diffusion limitations even at high current density and fuel utilisation. Moreover, the new concept shows advanced scalability properties with stable yield.

2) Development of the atomic layer deposition (ALD) to commercial readiness.
The main goal of the specific objective is to implement ALD process for barrier layer deposition. It will improve electrochemical performance of single cell and increase durability for longer lifetime. Moreover, optimized ALD process may reduce raw material consumption and decrease overall cell manufacturing time. Experimental cells with ALD nanolayer showed very high efficiency starting already at 600 ËšC. Compared to standard cell, cell with ALD barrier had up to 25% lower area specific resistance at 650 ËšC. Any defects, delamination, cracks, zirconate deposition or other defects were observed after fuel cell production with this type of barrier, that also had a positive effect on cell durability, showing lower degradation rate. The work on scaling up the process is still ongoing, showing good preliminary results.

3) Carry out pilot testing and prepare commercialisation.
The work is focused on pilot testing of new cells and commercialization plan. This task will be fulfilled together with strategic partners to validate manufactured cells on system level. For that, several pilot projects have been selected and are currently being supported by Elcogen to prove high efficiency and low degradation level of cells. The results will be disseminated to the public to show performance and robustness of Elcogenâ€™s products, but also to prove huge potential and competitiveness of solid oxide cell technology.

4) Produce analysis and design for production scale-up.
In order to ramp up manufacturing up to 300 000 cells a year at the end of the project and up to 2 million cells by 2022, Elcogen started a thorough analysis of current manufacturing method to identify the main problems and bottlenecks. As outcome, a completely new approach is investigated for future factory with unique manufacturing techniques. This work is performed by Elcogen in tight collaboration with the best industrial equipment manufacturer partners to design automated production line with keeping extremely high quality of the product and total yield above 95%.

Final results

As one of the major obstacles in implementation of solid oxide cell systems into the market is high cost, with help of BestInClassSOFC project Elcogen aims to overcome this problem and to propose to its customers cheap and reliable product. Moreover, the next cell generation will offer even higher efficiency compared to current cell type, with the highest electrical performance on the market.
In order to show huge potential of the technology to the public, Elcogen is participating in several projects implementing the solid oxide cell technology not only in CHP systems for combined heat and power generation, but also in electrolysis and energy storage areas to increase penetration of renewable sources utilisation.
Fuel cells generate no pollution such as nitrogen oxide (NOx), sulphur oxide (SOx), or particulate matter (PM10) and reduced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 50-66% in line with higher electrical efficiency compared to other power generators (or even zero-emission if hydrogen or ammonia are used as fuel). Possibility to operate in electrolysis or reversible mode is also extremely important to build new ecological society. Thus, this project has a huge socio-economic and ecological impacts, being a part of effective weapon against pollutions and global warming processes, for the new cleaner future.