Novel Sulfur-Tolerant Anode Material for Direct Hydrocarbon Solid Oxide Fuel Cells

The novel material acts as a promising anode material for high performance SOFCs with high tolerance towards carbon deposition and sulphur poisoning to efficiently convert practical fuels into electricity.

Solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) is a very promising energy conversion device to convert the fuel chemical energy directly to electricity. In addition to high energy conversion efficiency and low emissions, another significant advantage of SOFC is fuel flexibility. Fuels like hydrogen, natural gas, propane, biogases, liquid hydrocarbons or coal can be used as SOFC fuels.

However, there are two major challenges for hydrocarbon fueled SOFC one of which is carbon deposition in the anode/electrolyte interface. This leads to rapid degradation of the cell performance. The other is sulfur poisoning which can dramatically degrade SOFC performance even when sulfur species is presented in ppm levels. This constitutes a major challenge for the industry since sulfur species such as hydrogen sulfide (H2S) are widely present as impurities or additives in many economically available fuel sources, and their concentration can reach very high levels.