Plansee SE
Plansee, a division of the Plansee Group, manufactures since 1921 refractory metals and composites from metal powders. The Plansee Group increased consolidated sales in the fiscal year 2014/15 (last day 28 February 2015) to 1.26 billion EUR and employed on a worldwide basis, within all associated companies 11,800 staff.
Plansee is involved in the process right from the start: the Plansee Group divisions GTP and Molymet process ore concentrates from mines into metal oxides, which Plansee then reduces to pure metal powder. The metal powder is then compacted, sintered and processed in various additional forming steps to produce highly resistant materials.
Plansee operates in the following markets: the coating industry, energy transmission and distribution, the lighting industry, thermal processes, ion implantation, the electronics industry, tungsten-heavy metal alloys, medical technology and sapphire production.
For more than 15 years, Plansee has been well known for its strong contribution to the development and commercialization of SOFC technology worldwide. Based on its outstanding experience in powder metallurgy (P/M), Plansee’s activities in the field of component and stack development for the SOFC go back to the 1990s. This was when the first powder metallurgical SOFC interconnects has been developed, a product which has been industrialized later then for an US customer base. Since then the core team of Plansees so-called growth option SOFC has been rising to more than 30 people combined with continuous investments in dedicated and sophisticated equipment for SOFC development and pilot production of related products.
In regard to this particular project, since more than 10 years Plansee has sustainable pursued, developed and established specific P/M technologies for metal supported cells (MSC), such as substrate fabrication, coating, sintering and thin film electrolyte deposition. Based on that P/M component core know how, Plansee started additionally the development of a MSC based SOFC stack concept for mobile applications.