Molecular dynamics study for sintering property analysis of Ni-YSZ cermet

Microstructural change of porous electrodes in SOFC caused by sintering affected by materials and impurities is one of the main factors of the long-term degradation. Since it is difficult to clarify the effects of materials and impurities on sintering by experiments, atomistic scale simulation is important. In this study, we performed molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of porous structure of Ni and analyzed sintering properties of porous structure by employing master sintering curve theory. We have succeeded to obtain the sintering activation energy and its size dependency and to identify the dominant sintering mechanism by comparing sintering activation energy with activation energy of surface diffusion on each facet.