Recycling and Reuse Strategies for Ceramic Components of Solid Oxide Cells
Stephan Sarner, Norbert H. Menzler, Andrea Hilgers, Olivier Guillon
Abstract
The integration of solid oxide cells (SOCs) into circular economy is crucial to enable efficient preservation of critical and high-cost resources such as rare earth elements, cobalt, and nickel used in conventional SOC applications. Based on the fuel electrode-supported cell (FESC) design, a semi-closed loop recycling approach was applied for cell material from CeramTec/Forschungszentrum Jülich. We show that more than 85 wt% of the ceramic components can be successfully reprocessed to new fuel electrode-based substrate that can be further used in cell production. Reprocessing of sintered bodies requires a multi-stage procedure. Increasing the amount of recyclate in the substrate leads to changes in substrate properties such as higher porosities and reduced shrinkage.