Improvement in solid oxide fuel cell performance through design modiﬁcations: An approach based on root cause analysis Tapobrata Dey a,b , Debanand Singdeo a , Rajendra N. Basu b,** , Manaswita Bose a , Prakash C. Ghosh a,* a Department of Energy Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai 400076, India b Fuel Cell and Battery Division, CSIR-Central Glass and Ceramic Research Institute, Kolkata 700032, India article info Article history: Received 30 May 2014 Received in revised form 7 August 2014 Accepted 10 August 2014 Available online xxx Keywords: Solid oxide fuel cell design Flow distribution Contact resistance Stacking load abstract Performance of the solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) is signiﬁcantly affected by ohmic and concentration losses. The ohmic losses increase with reduction in macroscopic and microscopic contact area at the interfaces of different components. On the other hand, the concentration losses depend on the distribution of fuel and oxidant over the active area. Present work aims to investigate the performance improvement through design modiﬁ- cations obtained from root cause analysis. The inﬂuence of the interfacial resistance (ohmic), both, in terms of the external compression load, i.e., the interaction at the microscopic level and macroscopic contact area, is minimised. The effect of the uniformity of the ﬂow distribution on the performance of the scaled up SOFC is analysed. To these objectives, the base conﬁguration is modiﬁed and the inﬂuence of the different modiﬁca- tions on the electrochemical performance is studied. At 0.7 V, the performance is observed to be enhanced by 62% through minimization of the contact resistance between inter- connect and electrode. It is further improved by 100% with an increase in the apparent contact area for a given cell. Additional 50% enhancement in performance is observed by achieving better uniformity in the ﬂow distribution. Overall ~212% enhancement in the performance is achieved with a design, which consists of all the modiﬁcations in one cell. Copyright © 2014, Hydrogen Energy Publications, LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) has been identiﬁed as one of the promising candidates for alternate power generation because of its high efﬁciency, low emission of pollutants, and fuel ﬂexibility [1e4]. In an SOFC, the ceramic electrolyte is placed between two porous electrodes, which are further sand- wiched between a pair of bipolar plates that form the housing of the cell. The bipolar plates (interconnect) also act as current collectors, as well as pathways for fuel and oxidant. Performance of SOFC has been a topic of interest in last few decades. Basu et al., have mainly focused on developing ma- terial for improved performance and have achieved current * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ91 22 25767896; fax: þ91 22 25764890. ** Corresponding author. Tel.: þ91 33 24292951; fax: þ91 33 24730957. E-mail addresses: rnbasu@cgcri.res.in (R.N. Basu), pcghosh@iitb.ac.in, chhamugram@gmail.com (P.C. Ghosh). Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/he international journal of hydrogen energy xxx (2014) 1 e9 Please cite this article in press as: Dey T, et al., Improvement in solid oxide fuel cell performance through design modiﬁcations: An approach based on root cause analysis, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.ijhydene.2014.08.025 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhydene.2014.08.025 0360-3199/Copyright © 2014, Hydrogen Energy Publications, LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.