A stochastic 3D model for three-phase heterogeneous microstructures in SOFC-electrodes

An original stochastic model to simulate complex 3D microstructures of SOFC-electrodes with gradient and global heterogeneity has been developed. The synthetic microstructures generated by the model were compared to real microstructures of Ni-YSZ electrodes acquired by tomography. The ability of the model to generate representative microstructures has been demonstrated. Finally, the model was fitted on real electrode reconstructions. The results obtained shown that the phase surface area density curves and several microstructural properties of the synthetic microstructures were very close to those of the real ones. The flexibility of the model and the results obtained shown that it could be used in the framework of numerical microstructural optimizations of SOFC-electrodes.