USING SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENT TO DEVELOP A DESIGN METHODOLOGY FOR SELF-SHAPING SOLID OXIDE FUEL CELL MULTILAYER CERAMIC COMPOSITES

Traditional ceramic manufacturing techniques offer a limited assortment of achievable 3D geometries. For multilayer ceramic composites, such as solid oxide fuel cells, this is further limited to only planar and tubular forms. While there has been interest in a variety of advanced manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing, a less conventional option has also gained interest. Self-shaping of multilayer ceramic composites utilizing mismatched thermal expansion coefficient driven bilayer shrinkage is an alternative manufacturing strategy which circumvents many issues associated with other techniques. In this process, a tape cast substrate is sprayed with a patterned or uniform film which contracts relative to the substrate while cooling from the peak sintering temperature to room temperature resulting in controlled deformation. Reliably predicting the final 3D geometry for any arbitrary combination of 2D substrate shape and film pattern is nontrivial, and disagreement between the degree of curvature predicted from theory and that observed from experiment complicate the adoption of this manufacturing strategy. This work looks at several geometries for which these scaling laws have already been developed and applies them to the ceramic system both through experimentation and simulation. By comparing experiment and simulation, we can modify our model to accurately represent the real material behavior. We seek to accommodate this disagreement so that we may accurately apply the above-mentioned scaling laws to efficiently design starting substrate and film.