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Performance and durability of thin film thermocouple array on a porous electrode

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-09-15, 15:15 authored by Erdogan Guk, Manoj Ranaweera, Vijay Venkatesan, Jung-Sik Kim
Management of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) thermal gradients is vital to limit thermal expansion mismatch and thermal stress. However, owing to harsh operation conditions of SOFCs and limited available space in stack configuration, the number of techniques available to obtain temperature distribution from the cell surface is limited. The authors previously developed and studied a thermocouple array pattern to detect surface temperature distribution on an SOFC in open circuit conditions. In this study, the performance in terms of mechanical durability and oxidation state of the thin film thermoelements of the thermocouple array on the porous SOFC cathode is investigated. A thin-film multi-junction thermocouple array was sputter deposited using a magnetron sputter coater. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) characterisation techniques were carried out to understand characteristics of the thin film before and after temperature (20 °C–800 °C) measurement. Temperature readings from the sensor agreed well with the closely placed commercial thermocouple during heating segments. However, a sensor failure occurred at around 350 °C during the cooling segment. The SEM and XPS tests revealed cracks on the thin film thermoelements and oxidation to the film thickness direction.

Funding

The authors appreciate financial support from Ministry of National Education of the Republic of Turkey and the EPSRC’s UK-Korea Collaborative Research Activity in Fuel Cells project on “Novel diagnostic tools and techniques for monitoring and control of SOFC stacks”, EP/M02346X/1.

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering

Published in

Sensors

Citation

GUK, E. ... et al, 2016. Performance and durability of thin film thermocouple array on a porous electrode. Sensors, 16 (9), 1329.

Publisher

MDPI / © The Authors

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-08-15

Publication date

2016-08-23

Notes

This is an open access article published by MPDI and distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

ISSN

1424-8239

Language

  • en