Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) are considered promising energy conversion devices thanks to their several potential benefits, including low pollutant emissions, high-energy efficiency, the possibility of using different kinds of fuels and the possibility to build CHP and hybrid systems. However, SOFC technology is still in embryonic infancy and many problems (i.e. mechanical stress, electrode sintering, electrode and interconnect materials and fabrication, startup time) must be solved in order to achieve the goal of a highly efficient and clean energy system with at least the same reliability, costs and lifetime of the “traditional” energy systems. This challenge entails an increased research effort for industry and research institutions in order to develop advanced numerical models and computer codes, that can be used in both industrial and research environments for fuel cells design and development. This could yield a better understanding of the physical processes and help fuel cell designers to define more promising strategies. In the present thesis numerical model of three-dimensional SOFC is defined by considering all the occurred phenomena in each component of the fuel cell, using FLUENT software. After validating model, we concentrate to model two main cases, an anode-supported an electrolyte-supported SOFC, in this thesis. Then we studied the effect of variation of some operating condition parameters such as operating temperature pressure and some other parameters such as electrolyte thickness conductivity, anode cathode porosity, mass fraction of hydrogen (anode stoichiometric coefficient), rate of mass flow inlet in both anode’s and cathode’s channel, anode thickness, channel land area width and flow pattern on the polarization curve of these two main models.
