Progress in SOC Development at Fraunhofer IKTS

After long and successful development history of Solid Oxide Cells (SOC) continuous improvement in performance, longevity, manufacturing, and system integration it is necessary to bring this highly efficient technology to the market. The activities on material development and optimization at IKTS are focused mainly on enhancement of durability for SOFC, SOEC, and rSOC operation and on boosting the power density. During recent years considerable efforts on simplification and automation of cell and stack manufacturing processes have been addressed. The processes for electrode manufacturing have been adjusted for high yield automated printing on thin electrolytes with integrated quality control measures. Efficient ways for reduction of time and energy consumption for sealing process of SOC stacks have been found and demonstrated in pilot production as well as automated assembling of components to stacks was shown. The increasing interest in “green hydrogen” created multiple opportunities for SOEC technology to be considered as inherent part of industrial and chemical processes. IKTS pioneering work on coupled operation of SOEC module with Fischer-Tropsch reactor provided first demonstration of feasibility of this approach for wax production. However, high power electrolysis applications (>10 MW) will need new approaches for stack design and put higher requirements on durability.