Recent fabrication techniques for micro-tubular solid oxide fuel cell support: A review

Micro-tubular solid oxide fuel cell (MT-SOFC) has recently attracted much attention due to their greater tolerance to thermal cycling, quicker start-up capability, higher output density and better portable characteristics as compared with planar and tubular SOFCs. MT-SOFC requires one of the cell components to act as a support for deposition of remaining cell layers. In fact, the support fabrication step is the most important part as the quality of the support greatly affects performances of the MT-SOFCs. However, there is limited information regarding the fabrication processes especially extrusion of the support for the MT-SOFCs. The aim of this paper is to review on conventional and recent introduced phase inversion-based extrusion techniques, their characteristics and performances. A brief discussion on future direction of a more advanced phase inversion-based extrusion in the MT-SOFCs fabrication, including co-extrusion technique is also included.