Chapter 9 – Life and Reliability of Solid Oxide Fuel Cell-Based Products: A Review

Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) are a technology rapidly developing toward widespread commercialization, with hundreds of megawatts of generation capacity installed in the field for large-scale power generation (100 kW–1 MW), and small-scale distributed power generation (<5 kW scale) undergoing large precommercial field trials in Europe and Japan. Although rapidly improving, challenges still remain in achieving SOFC stack operating lives of up to 90,000 h at a cost competitive with more established power generation technology. This chapter provides a review of the current development status of the main SOFC developers and technology variants based on publicly available literature. The techniques being developed to accelerate technology development cycles by enabling lifetime prediction from relatively short-duration tests are also discussed.