The ageing of Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFCs) is a key problem because of the requirement of 50,000 hours to their lifetime in many applications. At present, such performance is still not attainable because degradation occurs at more than 1% per thousand hours under practical test conditions. In this thesis, the ageing of the Rolls Royce Fuel Cell Systems (RRFCS)Integrated Planar Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (IP-SOFC) was studied under different operating conditions, especially by accelerated degradation testing (ADT), in order to investigate the fuel cell stability and degradation behaviour under non-steady operating conditions for further improvement of the systems.
This work demonstrates that the long-term durability of the IP-SOFC is very good when pure hydrogen is used as fuel. However, the introducing of even a small amount of methane in fuel has demonstrated the capacity to damage the IP-SOFC through the formation of carbon deposits on the anode surface. Future work is therefore required to identify viable alternative materials and optimal operating conditions
