Modeling of mass and charge transport in a solid oxide fuel cell anode structure by a 3D lattice Boltzmann approach

A 3D model at microscale by the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is proposed for part of an anode of a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) to analyze the interaction between the transport and reaction processes and structural parameters. The equations of charge, momentum, heat and mass transport are simulated in the model. The modeling geometry is created with randomly placed spheres to resemble the part of the anode structure close to the electrolyte. The electrochemical reaction processes are captured at specific sites where spheres representing Ni and YSZ materials are present with void space. This work focuses on analyzing the effect of structural parameters such as porosity, and percentage of active reaction sites on the ionic current density and concentration of H2 using LBM. It is shown that LBM can be used to simulate an SOFC anode at microscale and evaluate the effect of structural parameters on the transport processes to improve the performance of the SOFC anode. It was found that increasing the porosity from 30 to 50 % decreased the ionic current density due to a reduction in the number of reaction sites. Also the consumption of H2 decreased with increasing porosity. When the percentage of active reaction sites was increased while the porosity was kept constant, the ionic current density increased. However, the H2 concentration was slightly reduced when the percentage of active reaction sites was increased. The gas flow tortuosity decreased with increasing porosity.