Protonic ceramic electrochemical devices (PCEDs) such as fuel cells, electrolysis cells, membrane reactors, and electrochemical hydrogen compressors can operate at low temperatures (300-600oC) because of the low proton transport activation energy, which allows the significant improvement of durability, materials cost, and efficiency of PCEDs. The great effort has been devoted to discovering new component materials for achieving improved cell or stack performance. Parallelly, the manufacturing of the cells and stacks with the desired microstructures should also be paid more attention. In this work, the highly compacted multilayer protonic ceramic fuel cell and electrolysis cell stacks were designed for achieving significant improvement of volumetric power density and substantially decreased the device size, which will be fabricated by a novel laser 3D printing technique. The crack-free layers of dense protonic ceramic electrolyte, dense interconnect, porous hydrogen electrode and porous oxygen electrode were 3D printed and laser sintered, which showed desired microstructures and promising electrochemical properties. The five-layer single cells comprised of two porous electrodes, one dense electrolyte, and two interconnect layers were automatically manufactured through laser 3D printing. The single cells demonstrated promising fuel cell and water electrolysis performance at 600oC.
