Computational fluid dynamics modeling of solid oxide fuel cells

A comprehensive, multi-physics, multi-dimensional model has been developed to simulate solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs). The model fully couples electrochemical kinetics with multi-dimensional gas dynamics and multi-component transport of species. The developed model is a full cell model, including all components of SOFC, flow channels, active and inactive gas diffusion electrodes and electrolyte. The present model is implemented in a commercially available CFD software, Fluent, using its customization ability via User Defined Functions (UDF). It is able to predict conventional I-V curve (polarization curve) in addition to details of internal processes, such as flow field, species concentrations, potential and current distributions throughout the cell. It is found that mass transfer limitation plays an important role in SOFC performance, especially under high current density operation.