3D Printing of Porous-Dense-Porous 8YSZ Supports for Solid Oxide Cells Applications

The development of alternative sources for electric power generation and energy storage to meet the growing demand and ensuring environmental sustainability for the next decades is still being a challenge for the scientific community. In this context, fuel cells are of great interest in enabling sustainable generation of electricity, being highly efficient and being a reliable, efficient and safe technology during its operation. Fuel cells are electrochemical devices that directly convert chemical energy into electrical energy and heat by continuously feeding a fuel and an oxidant, and can also use surpluses of energy to reduce water to hydrogen as a chemical storage route when working on reverse mode. These devices are made up of two electrodes (fuel electrode and oxygen electrode) separated by an electrolyte. It has been shown that the use of additive manufacturing (AM) technologies combined with ceramic fabrication techniques to optimize the microstructures and geometries of the SOC devices enhance its performance and reliability. New printable formulations for ceramic pastes have been developed for electrolytes in order to enhance the active area of reaction. Among different strategies to improve the performance, the use of composite electrodes base on porous scaffold of the ionic conductor phase to be infiltrated by the catalytic active phase is widely used. With the advance of the AM technology, 8YSZ electrolytes and scaffolds with different configurations can be also fabricated by 3D printing method. In this present work, we aim to fabricate an innovative and complex structure for YSZ electrodes with dense and porous parts and optimize the fabrication parameters for different 3D-printing process to obtain enhanced features of the ceramic supports that will be applied for SOC. Focusing on optimize the 3D processing of combined porous and dense structures for SOFC/SOECs, dense (δ>95%) monolithic gas-tight YSZ thin electrolytes supported by porous scaffolds on both sides will be fabricated for later functionalization by infiltration of the electrodes. The fabrication of the porous dense porous electrolyte will be generated by: porosity integrated by the CAD design, generation of porosity by development of new ceramic pastes and tuning of the printing parameters.