H2S poisoning contamination effect on solide oxide fuel cell

Fuel Cells (FC) are offering global opportunities of an efficient energy system based on hydrogen technology. There are still some technical issues that have to be solved to reach the goal of large scale distribution of fuel cell based conversion systems. High temperature FC (HTFC) seems to be the most suitable to be used with current fuels, mainly methane from natural gas or syngas from biomass gasification. The main problem with these fuels is the contamination with H2S. The article investigates the resistance level of SOFC to H2S by electrochemical testing. The tests measure the effect on polarization of H2S introduction at increasing concentration and investigates the possibility of recovering with standard hydrogen concentration. The analysis is a first step to a complete model that predicts the effect of H2S in solid oxide fuel cells depending on fuel cell type, anode design and operation conditions