A review of standardising SOFC measurement and quality assurance at FZJ

The need for standardisation/quality assurance (QA) is argued for citing extant problems with consistency, repeatability and reliability of data. A review of the cell testing procedure/QA system used at Forschungszentrum Julich (FZJ) is given including an outline of how the FZJ system was developed. This is put in the context of more extensive QA systems following the outlines of the ISO 9000 series standards. Examples are used to illustrate how and why a number of standard cell test parameters was adopted. It was found that pre-normative research used to define testing parameters led to an improvement in cell performance generally. Therefore, it is recommended that other solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) labs develop standardisation in testing and QA systems to maintain and improve their measurement processes. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.