Towards Quantification of Local Electrochemical Parameters in Microstructures of Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Electrodes using High Performance Computations

A numerical reaction-and-transport model was constructed to simulate local electrochemistry in electrode microstructures of solid oxide fuel cells. The model computes local distributions of electrochemical parameters in unstructured meshes that preserve surface/interface morphologies of real microstructures. In addition, local triple phase boundaries are treated as thin string-like volumes in which a volumetric physical reaction rate is computed as a source term. Using the finite element MOOSE framework and the Joule supercomputer, we performed a simulation based on a 5.5 x 5.5 x 5.0 mu m(3) reconstructed volume of a cathode microstructure from a commercial manufacturer. The simulation, with about 1.28 million degrees of freedom, took less than 10 minutes of active runtime with the usage of 64 CPU cores. Prospects for such simulations are discussed.