Development of tailored porous microstructures for infiltrated catalyst electrodes by aqueous tape casting methods

Recent SOFC research has shown that impregnating fine catalyst structures into porous scaffolds to be an extremely promising route for electrode development. It is clear that in optimising the advantages offered by this technique there will be an obvious link between the morphology of the porous scaffold and the infiltrated catalyst. There are significant potential benefits to using aqueous systems for the manufacture of the scaffold. They include the potential for a far larger range of pore formers which may be employed to create specific pore morphologies and also reduced environmental burdens, such as exhaust handling, worker exposure and disposal. Recent and ongoing activities to develop such systems at University of St Andrews will be described. Areas of discussion will be effects of ceramic particle size, the size ratio of pore former to ceramic particle, pore former type and loading and how these interact with other tape constituents both on the behaviour during processing and on the final fired morphology. Better understanding of these complex relationships will help in designing optimised porous structures in the future.