Quantifying the interfacial strength of oxide scale and SS 441 substrate used in SOFC

Under a typical SOFC working environment, oxide scale will grow on the metallic interconnects in oxidant environment. The growth of the oxide scale induces the growth stresses in the oxide scale and on the scale/substrate interface combined with the thermal stresses induced by thermal expansion coefficient mismatch between the oxide scale and the substrate, which may lead to scale delamination/buckling and eventual spallation during stack cooling, even leading to serious cell performance degradation. Therefore, the interfacial adhesion strength between the oxide scale and substrate is crucial to the reliability and durability of the metallic interconnect in SOFC operating environments. As a powerful contender of ferritic interconnects used in SOFC, its interfacial strength between the oxide scale and SS 441 substrate is very important for its application. In this paper, we applied an integrated experimental/analytical methodology to quantify the interfacial adhesion strength between oxide scale and metallic interconnect. The predicted interfacial strength is discussed in detailed.