Fuel Cells & Electrolyzers - Consulting Services
Energy storage solutions are required in sizes ranging from grid scale and commercial systems down to personal use devices. Energy storage and conversion technologies depend on complex materials systems, advanced ceramics processing, surface and interface reactions, and precise optimization to overcome efficiency, durability, and cost challenges.
Lucideon's expertise in materials consultancy and ceramics processing means we can support organizations with ceramic processing and ceramic materials research for solid oxide fuel cells and electrolyzers (SOFCs and SOECs).
Accelerate your product development cycle and improve performance at every stage of the fuel cell lifecycle with Lucideon's deep experience in ceramic materials development, novel sintering methods, and materials characterization.
Emerging technologies such as the adoption of next-generation SOFC architectures, Flash Sintering, and enhanced advanced ceramics processing can significantly lower manufacturing costs, improve microstructure, and deliver higher power densities. Lucideon's expertise allows clients to optimize the critical ceramic parameters needed to improve reliability, reduce degradation, and shorten time-to-market.
Leverage Lucideon's materials expertise, characterization techniques, and industry experience to accelerate your fuel cell and electrolyser product designs, optimize your processing techniques, and solve your most challenging materials issues.
Product and process development
We support full development cycles for ceramic and multi-material fuel cell and electrolyser components:
- Interface condition assessments and bonding/adhesion testing involves characterization of material interfaces within membrane electrode assemblies, sealing interfaces, and fuel cell stacks. We evaluate bonding behaviour after processing, testing, and thermal cycling
- Coating integrity assessment includes evaluation of ceramic and metallic coatings after deposition and performance testing to enable optimization of coating parameters and reduce development cycles
- Metallographic and ceramic cross-section examinations leverage our high-quality imaging and analysis to understand microstructure, porosity, grain growth, and other behaviours critical to fuel cell and electrolyser material performance
Characterization
Lucideon's advanced testing suite for ceramic, metallic, and composite materials used in fuel cells includes:
- Density characterization of components produced via powder metallurgy, metal injection moulding (MIM), additive manufacturing, and ceramic processing routes
- Elemental diffusion and interface analysis using techniques such as energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) mapping, electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD), and a range of analytical chemistry techniques to characterize ceramic layers, material interactions, electrode/electrolyte interfaces, and diffusion barriers.
- Glass seal evaluations for characterization of crystallization temperatures, seal composition, and glass-to-metal interfaces for fuel cell and electrolyser stack design.
Failure and degradation analysis
Understanding failure modes is essential for improving fuel cell and electrolyser performance and lifetime:
- Failure analysis allows root-cause identification for ceramic cracking, delamination, electrode degradation, contamination, and microstructural instability.
- Contaminant identification for detection of impurities and chemical species that may lead to degradation, performance loss, or failure.
- Degradation assessments for qualification of SOFC components after thermal and mechanical testing to determine the parameters required to achieve high power density and mitigate degradation kinetics.
Additive manufacturing for fuel cells
For organizations using or adopting additive manufacturing for ceramic (SOFC, SOEC) or metal fuel cell and electrolyzer components, Lucideon provides:
- Powder and material development
- Formulation development
- Drying, de-binding and sintering
- Part testing and characterization
- Digital and computational techniques
Lucideon has extensive experience in additive manufacturing process development, supporting high-performance ceramic and metallic components across the energy sector.
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