The Simulation of Solid Oxide Fuel-Cell Membrane-Electrode Assembly

A solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) Membrane Electrode Assembly (MEA) simulation model and the corresponding FORTRAN coding strategy are presented. For a given fuel/oxidant composition and MEA configuration, this newly developed code can predict the cell output voltage and polarizations versus the cell current density. The activation polarization is evaluated by solving the Butler-Volmer equation. The concentration polarization is based on the dusty-gas model. The ohmic polarization is obtained by considering the ionic conductivity of the electrolyte. Leakage polarization is also included in the model. The FORTRAN code, written as a stand alone module, has been used to predict the performance of SOFCs. This code could be easily incorporated into a computational fluid dynamics code as a SOFC sub-module for three dimensional fuel cell simulations.