ME Seminar - High Temperature Solid Oxide Electrolysers for Green Fuel Production

Guest Speaker: Prof. CHEN Ming

Department of Energy Conversion and Storage
Technical University of Denmark

Dr Ming Chen is a Full Professor at the Department of Energy Conversion and Storage, Technical University of Denmark. He received his Bachelor degree from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1996, Master from Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1999, and Doctor of Sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) in 2005. He has >25 years of research experiences on solid oxide cells (SOCs), covering materials, cell development and testing, stack testing, interconnects, microstructure characterization, materials and microstructure evolution modelling, and has co-authored >170 articles in journals (Energy & Environmental Science, npj Computational Materials, Chemical Engineering Journal, Acta Materialia etc.) or conference proceedings. He has acted as principal investigator/project coordinator for 13 Danish and European projects and co-PI for the other 6 projects. He is the awardee of the Richard and Patricia Spriggs Phase Equilibria Award by the American Ceramic Society in 2005 and of the ForskEL prize in 2016 for excellence in project management and project outcomes. He is also a member of the Danish Natural Science Academy and is currently acting as the Vice President of the Danish Electrochemical Society.

Globally the amount of electricity generated from renewable energy sources is increasing. To integrate high amount of fluctuating energy into the existing energy grid, efficient and cost competitive conversion of electricity into other kinds of energy carriers is needed. Solid oxide electrolysis (SOE) has the potential to become a key technology in enabling this integration. With solid oxide electrolysis cells (SOECs), electrical energy can be converted to chemical energy and stored as H₂ or synthesis gas (syngas, CO+H₂) via high temperature electrolysis of steam or co-electrolysis of steam and CO2. H₂ and syngas can be further processed to a variety of synthetic fuels, which may be stored and later either reconverted into electricity or used in the transportation sector. Within the last decade, we have coordinated and participated in a number of projects on developing the SOEC technology. In this presentation results from the recently completed projects will be given. The focus will be on performance and durability of different generations of SOEC cells and stacks, together with post-mortem analysis results. Latest results on using SOEC stacks for grid balancing based on real-world wind profile will be highlighted. Potential problems in terms of life time limiting degradation phenomena in SOEC operation (both at the cell level and at the stack level) will be discussed in detail based on own findings as well as literature. Finally, some of the challenges faced in the future development of SOEC cells, stack components and stacks will be presented.