Thesis for degree: Licentiate of Engineering

6 Future
work
Future work will involve a study of an SOFC at multiscale which will offer promising
knowledge to understand in detail the effect of design. To approach a successful electricity
producing device with improved durability and life time, the understanding of multiscale
transport and reaction phenomena within the cell is crucial. The next step is to model the
involvement of microscale thermal diffusion through LBM connected to a macroscale CFD
model. In the extended model the Knudsen diffusion, which describes collisions between the
gas molecules and the porous structure (inside the porous electrodes), is also taken into
account. Also the electrochemical reactions are prospected to contribute to capture valuable
microstructural effects. These reactions occur at a limited part of the cell, the TPB, which can
only be captured if modeled at microscale or smaller. Here the Monte Carlo method could
offer advantages to improve the multiscale development.
Another extension of the model is to include catalytic chemical surface reactions (instead of
global kinetics expressions). These surface reactions can provide knowledge of the interaction
between the transport processes and the reactions which will be valuable for fuel cell model
development. The reforming reaction rate is dependent on temperature, concentrations, type
and catalyst available. If the chemical reactions can be simulated on a microscale level, it
would open up to involve all the detailed multistep chemical reactions. More knowledge and
understanding of the effect behind the activation energy is important to enable reduction of
the operating temperature. Physical and material properties are calculated from data found in
literature and therefore experimental work is desired for validation of the model.
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