Numerical and Experimental Study on Behaviors of Physical Properties of Molten Carbonate Fuel Cell (MCFC) Stack Components

Estimation of the mechanical strength of the stack components is important to get performance reliability, because when a specific pressure is applied to this stack at specific temperature, some of components have very weak mechanical strength at a given temperature. Properties of the stack components are measured using experimental and numerical method. Structural behavior of the stack can then be estimated during stack operation. The stack of Internal Reforming MCFC consists of various components, which are mainly composed of the anode, cathode, matrix, carbonate electrolyte, biopolar plate, etc. Mechanical properties of anode, cathode and matrix are necessary to simulate structural behavior of the stack during operation. Mechanical properties of each component in unit cell can be measured by comparing experimental with numerical results on compression. It can be possible to simulate structure behavior of the whole stack during operation based on this data. Numerical results on compression can be done using ABAQUS program which can compute strain-stress analysis. After comparing experimental with numerical results on compression of unit cell, mechanical properties of unit cell are obtained. The unit cell is then simplified to a one block of mesh which has mechanical properties of unit cell based on data. Finally the whole stack is modeled by stacking blocks as mentioned above. Thus, the structural behavior of the whole stack during operation can be computed efficiently.