Investigation of the effect of ion transition type on performance in solid oxide fuel cells fueled hydrogen and coal gas

Renewable energy will be a panacea for environmental difficulties due to the extensive usage of carbon-rich fuels as a main source of energy. As a result, hydrogen-fueled solid oxide fuel cell is a revolutionary clean technology that has a great contribution in solving the current energy and environmental-related challenges. Thus, a 3D model of hydrogen and coal gases fueled solid oxide fuel cell (H₂–SOFC) using different electrolytes has been developed and simulated using COMSOL commercial software to explore the performance of electrolyte supported SOFC. The performance of the developed model has been studied and characterized using different differential equations. Accordingly, it has been found that the performance of hydrogen-fueled oxide ion conducting electrolytes (SOFC–O) is lower than that of protonic conducting one (SOFC–H) at 800 °C. Furthermore, a numerical simulation has been conducted to investigate the result of temperature changes on SOFC performance at 400 °C, 600 °C, and 800 °C for proton-conducting SOFC and 800 °C and 1000 °C for oxygen-conducting SOFC. It has been demonstrated that SOFC–O shows a better performance at high temperatures compared with SOFC–H while SOFC–H can be an agreeable selection at medium temperatures. Therefore, this study reveals that the temperature augments the performance of both electrolytes, yet at higher working temperatures SOFC–H becomes more advantageous than SOFC–O to use hydrogen and coal gas as a primary fuel. Besides, the effect of channel height was also analyzed numerically and the finding disclosed that decreasing the channel height emerges in a curtly current path. Thus, it can be reasoned out that the performance of SOFC decreases when the channel height is increased.