ABSTRACT
For the past decades, the generation of efficient and pollution-free energy has been turned into a major challenge for the world due to significant global warming, depletion of fossil sources, and drastic increase in oil and gas demand. Fuel cell is an efficient, high-energy/power, and clean energy conversion system that converts a gaseous fuel such as hydrogen, natural gas, and other renewable fuels to electrical energy and heat by electrochemical combination of the fuel with an oxidant. Fuel cell and hydrogen society come much closer to reality after the commercialization of Toyota Motor Corporation’s fuel cell vehicle “MIRAI” and other car makers’ products as well as large installation of the stationary fuel cells by Bloom Energy that manufactures and markets solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) that produce electricity onsite. The MIRAI that is based on proton exchange membrane fuel cell has been a huge hit since the launch, and the wait for delivery of new vehicles is currently more than three years. In 2009, general sales of the world’s first residential fuel cell systems “Ene-Farm” were launched. Bloom Energy stated in 2011 that 200 servers based on SOFC had been deployed in California for corporations including eBay, Google, Yahoo, and Wal-Mart. However, it will take more time to fully commercialize the fuel cell systems. The overriding necessity of both low cost and rapid processing throughput needed to make fuel cell systems viable commercially still restricts their application. For example, if 100 MW of power is to be produced in a year at a current performance level of 0.15 kW per cell, this would be in excess of 65 million cells. The technology maturation along with companies’ validation, deployment, and commercialization has significantly help to move fuel cell from concept to reality. Recently, SOFCs have attracted more attention due to highly efficient power production from multiple fuel sources. This chapter outlines the background and basic principles of SOFC, and then describes kinetics of electrochemical reactions, cell design and operation, and thermodynamic, heat, and mass transfers in SOFCs.
