Journal Article

Synthesis strategies for improving the performance of doped-BaZrO 3 materials in solid oxide fuel cell applications

Traversa, Enrico, Bi, Lei

2014

Overview

Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) offer an efficient energy conversion technology for alleviating current energy problems. High temperature proton-conducting (HTPC) oxides are promising electrolytes for this technology, since their activation energy is lower than that of conventional oxygen-ion conductors, enabling the operating temperature reduction at 600 °C. Among HTPC oxides, doped BaZrO 3 materials possess high chemical stability, needed for practical applications. Though, poor sinterability and the resulting large volume of highly resistive grain boundaries hindered their deployment for many years. Nonetheless, the recently demonstrated high proton conductivity of the bulk revived the attention on doped BaZrO 3 , stimulating research on solving the sintering issues. The proper selection of dopants and sintering aids was demonstrated to be successful for improving the BaZrO 3 electrolyte sinterability. We here briefly review the synthesis strategies proposed for preparing BaZrO 3 -based nanostructured powders for electrolyte and electrodes, with the aim to improve the SOFC performance.