Developing a Novel Design for a Tubular Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Current Collector

Abstract

This study presents a novel current collector design for a tubular SOFC and numerically investigates its performance. The new current collector design has a flow channel with a trapezoidal shape. Several channels, such as four, eight, and twelve, are investigated, and their effects on cell performance are reported and compared. Additionally, a traditional tubular SOFC and the newly developed design are presented. The equations of mass conservation, momentum, charge transport, and energy were considered in the numerical model, and the ANSYS Fluent SOFC module was used to solve the numerical model. The results show that the developed design performed better than the traditional design. The new design with twelve channels collected 0.384 A, higher than the other designs. Although the design with twelve channels gave a high concentration of hydrogen at the outlet compared to the designs with four and eight channels, it gave higher performance than the designs with four and eight channels. Increasing the number of channels in the developed design enhanced the cell performance significantly due to the increased contact area, leading to the efficient collection of the generated current.