Dept. of Fundamental Research in Energy Engineering
Fuel Cells Laboratory at Department of Fundamental Researches in Energy Engineering, AGH is equipped with Modular Stack Test Bench (MSTB, hereafter), a state-of-the-art stack testing set-up. The MSTB system was designed by SOLD Power a leading European SOFC company to test a variety of different size stacks 100-800W. The test cell has an anode-supported structure, adopting Ni-YSZ cermet for the anode, dense YSZ for the electrolyte and three layers for the composite cathode. The cathode consists of Gadolinium Doped Ceria (GDC, hereafter), a buffer layer, mixed Lanthanum Strontium Cobalt Ferrite (LSCF, hereafter), a GDC functional layer and a LSCF collector layer. The dimensions of the cells that can be tested are 85 x 65 [mm x mm] for the anode support and 80 x 60 [mm x mm] for the cathode. The active cell area available for the reaction of the anode-supported cell is associated with the dimension of cathode and is equal to 48 [cm2]. The large size of a cell allows conducting locally resolved microstructure analysis that would not be possible for a laboratory-scale cell. The electric furnace allows to externally controlling the temperature of the cell stack. The bench has also the control tools for the heaters; mass flow controllers and the electronic load. Therefore the presented set-up has full capacity to conduct accelerated testing procedures. The system configuration of the MSTB is also shown in Fig. 1.
Academic Center of Materials and Nanotechnology
FEI Versa 3D is a high resolution scanning electron microscope (SEM) coupled with a focused ion beam (FIB) column. The instrument can be operated in three different modes: high-vacuum, low-vacuum and environmental mode (ESEM). The microscope is equipped with an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer (EDS) for local chemical analysis and a system for electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) analysis. Use of FIB enables 3D characterization of materials (ion etching layer-by-layer) as well as structural modification of sample surfaces at the nanometer scale.
more pictures of the laboratories including newly purchase apparatus are coming soon…