Fluid Mechanical Approaches for Rational Design of Infiltrated Electrodes of Solid Oxide Fuel Cells

Infiltration-based composite electrodes are one of the most promising structures to obtain solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) with high performance. For a rational design of advanced composite electrodes, we report here a comprehensive model based on fluid mechanics by using the Peclet number and contact angle hysteresis to precisely control the morphologies of the infiltrated nanoparticles. Depending on the key parameter, the drying rate, three distinct morphologies-film-like coating, discrete coating, and concentrated coating-were suggested for the model and confirmed through experiments on the infiltration of the electrode material into the porous electrolyte scaffold. We believe that these results can provide an in-depth understanding of the infiltration process, which will help in arriving at simple fabrication guidelines for designing advanced nanostructures using wet chemical processes.