Record-low sintering-temperature (600 ^oC) of solid-oxide fuel cell electrolyte

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

One of the major problems arising with Solid-Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) electrolyte is conventional sintering which requires a very high temperature (>1300 <SUP>o</SUP>C) to fully densify the electrolyte material. In the present study, the sintering temperature of SOFC electrolyte is drastically decreased down to 600 <SUP>o</SUP>C. Combinational effects of particle size reduction, liquid-phase sintering mechanism and microwave sintering resulted in achieving full density in such a record-low sintering temperature. Gadolinium doped Ceria (GDC) nano-particles are synthesized by co-precipitation method, Lithium (Li), as an additional dopant, is used as liquid-phase sintering aid. Microwave sintering of this electrolyte material resulted in decreasing the sintering temperature to 600 <SUP>o</SUP>C. Micrographs obtained from Scanning/Transmission Electron Microscopy (SEM/TEM) clearly pointed a drastic growth in grain-size of Li-GDC sample (~150 nm) than compared to GDC sample (<30 nm) showing the significance of Li addition. The sintered Li-GDC samples displayed an ionic conductivity of ~1.00 x 10<SUP>-2</SUP> S cm<SUP>-1</SUP> at 600 <SUP>o</SUP>C in air and from the conductivity plots the activation energy is found to be 0.53 eV.