Phase field modeling of microstructure evolution and concomitant effective conductivity change in solid oxide fuel cell electrodes

Microstructure evolution plays an important role in the performance degradation of SOFC electrodes. In this work, we propose a much improved phase field model to simulate the microstructure evolution in the electrodes of solid oxide fuel cell. We demonstrate that the tunability of the interfacial energy in this model has been significantly enhanced. Parameters are set to fit for the interfacial energies of a typical Ni-YSZ anode, an LSM-YSZ cathode and an artificial reference electrode, respectively. The contact angles at various triple junctions and the microstructure evolutions in two dimensions are calibrated to verify the model. As a demonstration of the capabilities of the model, three dimensional microstructure evolutions are simulated applying the model to the three different electrodes. The time evolutions of grain size and triple phase boundary density are analyzed. In addition, a recently proposed bound charge successive approximation algorithm is employed to calculate the effective conductivity of the electrodes during microstructure evolution. The effective conductivity of all electrodes are found to decrease during the microstructure evolution, which is attributed to the increased tortuosity and the loss of percolated volume fraction of the electrode phase. [Display omitted] •Improved phase field model with much enhanced tunability of interfacial energies.•Coupled phase coarsening and grain growth in the porous electrodes.•In situ evaluation of effective conductivity during microstructure coarsening.•Evolution of effective conductivity correlated to percolation and tortuosity.