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Journal of Advanced Ceramics 2023, 12(3): 587-597 https://doi.org/10.26599/JAC.2023.9220707
Research Article | Open Access | Issue | Published: 16 February 2023

Successful preparation of BaCo0.5Fe0.5O3–δ cathode oxide by rapidly cooling allowing for high-performance proton-conducting solid oxide fuel cells

Show Author's Information Yanru Yin,  Yanbin Zhou,  Yueyuan Gu,  Lei Bi( )
School of Resource Environment and Safety Engineering, University of South China, Hengyang 421001, China
Keywords:
cathode, solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), proton conductor, BaCo0.5Fe0.5O3–δ
Cite this article:
Yin Y, Zhou Y, Gu Y, et al. Successful preparation of BaCo0.5Fe0.5O3–δ cathode oxide by rapidly cooling allowing for high-performance proton-conducting solid oxide fuel cells. Journal of Advanced Ceramics, 2023, 12(3): 587-597. https://doi.org/10.26599/JAC.2023.9220707
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Abstract Full text Electronic supplementary material About this article

A pure phase BaCo0.5Fe0.5O3–δ (BCF), which cannot be obtained before, is successfully prepared in this study by using the calcination method with a rapid cooling procedure. The successful preparation of BCF allows the evaluation of this material as a cathode for proton-conducting solid oxide fuel cells (H-SOFCs) for the first time. An H-SOFC using the BCF cathode achieves an encouraging fuel cell performance of 2012 mW·cm–2 at 700 ℃, two-fold higher than that of a similar cell using the classical high-performance Ba0.5Sr0.5Co0.8Fe0.2O3–δ (BSCF) cathode. First-principles calculations reveal the mechanism for the performance enhancement, indicating that the new BCF cathode significantly lowers the energy barriers in the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) compared with the BSCF cathode. Therefore, improved cathode performance and fuel cell output are obtained for the BCF cell. The fuel cell using the BCF cathode also shows excellent long-term stability that can work stably for nearly 900 h without noticeable degradations. The fuel cell performance and long-term stability of the current BCF cell are superior to most of the H-SOFCs reported in previous reports, suggesting that BCF is a promising cathode for H-SOFCs.


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About this article

Successful preparation of BaCo0.5Fe0.5O3–δ cathode oxide by rapidly cooling allowing for high-performance proton-conducting solid oxide fuel cells

Show Author's information Yanru Yin, Yanbin Zhou, Yueyuan Gu, Lei Bi( )
School of Resource Environment and Safety Engineering, University of South China, Hengyang 421001, China

Abstract

A pure phase BaCo0.5Fe0.5O3–δ (BCF), which cannot be obtained before, is successfully prepared in this study by using the calcination method with a rapid cooling procedure. The successful preparation of BCF allows the evaluation of this material as a cathode for proton-conducting solid oxide fuel cells (H-SOFCs) for the first time. An H-SOFC using the BCF cathode achieves an encouraging fuel cell performance of 2012 mW·cm–2 at 700 ℃, two-fold higher than that of a similar cell using the classical high-performance Ba0.5Sr0.5Co0.8Fe0.2O3–δ (BSCF) cathode. First-principles calculations reveal the mechanism for the performance enhancement, indicating that the new BCF cathode significantly lowers the energy barriers in the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) compared with the BSCF cathode. Therefore, improved cathode performance and fuel cell output are obtained for the BCF cell. The fuel cell using the BCF cathode also shows excellent long-term stability that can work stably for nearly 900 h without noticeable degradations. The fuel cell performance and long-term stability of the current BCF cell are superior to most of the H-SOFCs reported in previous reports, suggesting that BCF is a promising cathode for H-SOFCs.

Keywords: cathode, solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), proton conductor, BaCo0.5Fe0.5O3–δ

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Publication history

Received: 29 September 2022
Accepted: 08 December 2022
Published: 16 February 2023
Issue date: March 2023

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© The Author(s) 2022.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 52272216 and 51972183), the Hundred Youth Talents Program of Hunan, and the Startup Funding for Talents at University of South China.

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