Oxide Protective Coatings for Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Interconnects

The long-term stability of SOFC stacks is a critical hurdle to their commercial success. To maintain low stack and system costs, metallic interconnect materials are required; to achieve long life, protective coatings must stabilize metal interconnect performance. Further, these coatings must exhibit sufficient bulk conductivity to achieve low stack area specific resistance. To exploit the cost advantages offered by metallic interconnects, coating approaches must be size-scalable and allow high volume throughput at low capital cost. NexTech has systematically developed cost-effective approaches to synthesizing and depositing oxide coatings through value-conscious materials processing and deposition processes. Recently, manganese cobalt spinel synthesis and deposition has been demonstrated using production process designed to allow high throughput production.