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Electrolyte research

A major loss in SOFCs is due to low oxygen ion conductivity in the oxide electrolyte. By making thin film electrolytes, we’ve enabled efficient SOFC operation at temperatures as low as 300 °C. Our efforts to improve and understand the electrolyte go beyond thin film fabrication to modeling aided by Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) and quantum simulations and efforts to create an “ion highway” via irradiation.

In the electrolyte, high oxygen ion conductivity is desirable. We use quantum simulations to calculate the energetic barriers to oxygen ion migration in electrolyte materials, but this is not enough to allow full understanding of oxygen diffusion. We must also use KMC to study how oxygen selects which barriers to “jump over” at elevated temperature.

The “ion highway” project is an attempt to create dislocations in the crystal structure through which oxygen can move rapidly. By irradiating the electrolyte to create defects and annealing the electrolyte to allow the defects to travel through the crystal, long dislocations can form. In a thin film, many of these dislocations may travel through the whole electrolyte. If oxygen diffusion along a dislocation is fast, then these dislocations serve as highways for rapid ion transport, increasing the conductivity of the electrolyte and thus reducing a major source of loss in a SOFC.

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