Nickel Coarsening in SOFC Anodes

Solid oxide fuel cell anodes are a porous composite of nickel metal and yttria-stabilized zirconia (Ni-YSZ), and their electrochemical activity lives entirely at the triple-phase-boundary where nickel, YSZ and fuel gas meet. This simulator renders a block of that microstructure and evolves it under the real Lifshitz–Slyozov–Wagner coarsening law: nickel particles ripen over simulated operating hours, small ones shrinking away while large ones grow, following an Arrhenius temperature dependence and a current-density-linked migration term. Live readouts track the mean particle radius, the resulting loss of triple-phase-boundary density, and the cell voltage decay that microstructural degradation causes over a stack's multi-thousand-hour service life.