Porous electrodes are widely used in fuel cells to enhance electrode performance due to their high surface area. Increasingly, such electrodes are designed with both micro-scale and nano-scale features. In the current work, carbon based porous materials have been synthesized and utilized as bioelectrode support for biofuel cells, analysis of such porous electrodes via rotating disk electrode has been enhanced by a numerical model that considers diffusion and convection within porous media. Finally, porous perovskite metal oxide cathodes for solid oxide fuel cell have been modeled to simulate impedance response data obtained from symmetric cells.Carbon fiber microelectrodes (CFME) were fabricated to mimic the microenvironment of carbon fiber paper based porous electrodes. They were also miniature electrodes for small-scale applications. As observed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), carbon nanotubes (CNTs) formed a homogeneously intertwined matrix. Biocatalysts can fully infiltrate this matrix to form a composite, with a significantly enhanced glucose oxidation current - that is 6.4 fold higher than the bare carbon fiber electrodes.Based on the CNT based porous matrix, polystyrene beads of uniform diameter at 500 nm were used as template to tune the porous structure and enhance biomolecule transport. Focused ion beam (FIB) was used to observe the morphology both at the surface and the cross-section. It has been shown that the template macro-pores enhanced the fuel transport and the current density has been doubled due to the improvement.Like commonly used rotating disk electrode, the porous rotating disk electrode is a system with analytically solved flow field. Although models were proposed previously with first order kinetics and convection as the only mass transport at high rotations, some recent findings indicated that diffusion could play an important role at all disk rotation rates. In the current proposed model, enzymatic kinetics that follow a Ping Pong Bi Bi mechanism was considered, diffusional transport included, and the electrolyte transport of substrate outside the porous media discussed as well.Composite solid oxide fuel cells have good power generation due to enhanced ion conductivity in the cathode achieved by inclusion of high oxygen ion conductivity materials. Impedance spectroscopies of such cathodes were modeled to study the underlying transport and kinetic mechanisms. The effects of electronic conductor loading were studied, including loading values below the percolation threshold. The conductivity and oxygen surface exchange reaction rate were fitted to experimental data and percolation theory was utilized to explain the fitted trends.
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