(PI Neal Sullivan, funded by the Slater Energy Research Endowment Fund through the Colorado School of Mines Foundation)

In an effort to achieve the high voltages needed in practical applications, fuel-cell engineers go to great lengths to “stack” fuel cells in electrical series, much like stacking batteries within a flashlight. Stacking has proven to be a very expensive, unreliable solution, and greatly contributes to the limited use of solid-oxide fuel cells in the commercial marketplace. In this program, students and faculty at the Colorado Fuel Cell Center are achieving these high-voltage targets by utilizing precision ink-jet printing technology for development of the “Segmented-in-Series” (SIS) fuel-cell architecture shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Segmented-In-Series solid-oxide fuel cell architecture.

Figure 1: Segmented-In-Series solid-oxide fuel cell architecture. While the SIS architecture is based on microelectronics technology, microelectronics fabrication methods are extremely expensive, and are not economically viable for fabrication of fuel cells. In this project, we utilize a Fuji Dimatix DMP-2831 ink-jet printer for creation of the fine-pitch structures observed in Figure 1. Graduate students Nicolaus Faino and Wade Rosensteel are developing porous substrates and depositing fine-pitch fuel-cell materials in the Colorado Fuel Cell Center through this program, funded through the CSM Foundation and the Slater Energy Research Endowment Fund.

Figure 2: Graduate students Nicolaus Faino and Wade Rosensteel with the Fuji Dimatix ink-jet printer.

Ink-Jet Printing of Segmented-In-Series Fuel Cell Architectures