Thermal spray coatings for molten carbonate fuel cells separator plates

Abstract

Molten salt corrosion at the wet seal of separator plates is one of the principal life-limiting factors of molten carbonate fuel cells (MCFC). The wet seal must therefore be coated with an aluminide layer that is commonly produced by ion vapor deposition (IVD) of Al followed by heat treatment. However, this coating only lasts approximately 20 000 h and not the 40 000 h expected for a cell life. Moreover, the IVD Al coating is also very expensive since only a few plates can be coated simultaneously due to size limitations of the existing commercial vacuum chambers employed in IVD. The need of heat treatment further increases costs, particularly since it requires long heating and cooling cycles in order to minimize distortion of the thin stainless steel plates. Thermally sprayed coatings constitute an alternative that requires neither containment nor heat treatment, and also provides the possibility of depositing materials more resistant to molten carbonates than plain aluminides. However, separator plates coated by thermal spray suffer distortion, due both to sand blasting (usually required prior to coating), and to the heat transfer process that occurs during the spraying process. In this work, commercially available coatings have been applied by plasma spray and high velocity oxyfuel (HVOF), employing alternative surface preparation methods. Moreover, substrate pre-heating and/or cooling during deposition were examined in order to eliminate substrate distortion. FeCrAl, and NiAl as well as a quasi-crystalline approximant alloy AlCoFeCr were deposited on AISI 310 foils, and after optimization the resulting coatings were characterized by means of scanning electron microscopy-energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDS). The optimized coatings were then tested by immersion in a 62 mol.% Li2CO3/38 mol.% K2CO3 molten carbonate eutectic mixture at 700°C and by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. IVD Al coatings were also tested for comparison purposes. The results indicate that FeCrAl exhibits a higher molten salt corrosion resistance than IVD aluminide coatings whereas NiAl was attacked shortly after the beginning of the test. The QC approximant AlCoFeCr resisted 1000 h of attack but its composition changed. Grinding of the substrate prior to coating resulted in good adhesion and substrate distortion was minimized by Ar cooling during deposition.