Quantification of Microstructural and Transport Properties of Solid Oxide Fuel Cells From Three-Dimensional Physically Realistic Network Structures

The present work investigated a new method of calculating effective transport properties of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) electrodes from three-dimensional (3D) physically realistic network structures. These physically realistic network structures are topological equivalent representations of reconstructed microstructures in the form of spheres (nodes or bodies) and cylinders (segments or throats). Maximal ball algorithm is used to extract these physically realistic network structures from the series of two-dimensional (2D) cross-sectional images of SOFC electrodes. Dual-beam focused ion beam - scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) is performed on SOFC electrodes to acquire series of 2D cross-sectional images. Finite element method is implemented to compute the effective transport properties from the network structures. As an example, we applied this method to calculate the effective gas diffusivity of lanthanum strontium manganite (LSM) of SOFC. The results obtained from physically realistic network structures are compared with reconstructed 3D microstructures.