TY  - CONF
AU  - Pinto, R.
AU  - Welschinger, F.
AU  - Giesselmann, N.
AU  - Reinshagen, H.
AU  - Menzler, Norbert H.
TI  - Homogenization of fuel cell interconnects to determine the contacting configuration in a stack
M1  - FZJ-2024-04801
PY  - 2024
AB  - Large scale production of solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) is the next step for ensuring cleanenergy conversion. During manufacturing of SOFC stacks, metallic interconnects play avital role in electrical contacting which highly influences the overall stack performance.Therefore, the force applied to a fuel cell stack to establish electrical contact is verycrucial. Different parameters or boundary conditions may cause non-uniform forcedistribution and large plastic deformation in some regions of the active area resulting inlocal damage or hotpots during operation. The phenomena of contact pressure distributionmay be studied more intuitively using Finite Element Methods (FEM). However, due togeometrically complex design of interconnects, simulations on a stack level arecomputationally expensive. Computational homogenization may be used to simplify stacklevel simulations and is also pursued in this work. The focus of this paper is to create afinite element framework using the homogenization approach to understand the effects ofmechanical pressing of the stacking on individual interconnect contacts. This approachwould help reduce the model complexity for stack level FEM simulations and achievefaster computation times. Such a simulation could, in turn give an understanding of themechanical contact pressure distribution in a stack. This, combined with phenomenon likethermal expansion and creep could calculate a theoretical electrical resistance duringoperation. Within the scope of this short paper, the homogenization framework formechanical loading of an interconnect is discussed and a simplified model is created. Theforce-deformation behavior of the model was compared and validated with itscorresponding full-field simulation. This modelling approach may be used to optimizeparameters like stacking force, materials, design of individual contacts, etc. for idealcontact pressures at individual contacts.
T2  - 16th European SOFC & SOE Forum
CY  - 2 Jul 2024 - 5 Jul 2024, Lucerne (Switzerland)
Y2  - 2 Jul 2024 - 5 Jul 2024
M2  - Lucerne, Switzerland
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)24
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1028753
ER  -