Ceramic Anode Materials for Solid Oxide Fuel Cells

Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) offer very high efficiency in the conversion of chemical energy in a fuel to electrical energy and can potentially run with a variety of readily available hydrocarbon fuels. SOFCs operate at high temperature (>750 oC), though there is considerable interest in decreasing the working temperature of SOFCs to reduce costs and aging. Unfortunately, SOFC performance decreases rapidly as the operating temperature is reduced. The issue that limits the current SOFC anode performance is the use of multi-component composite systems to meet the anode requirements. Conventional SOFC anode material suffer from serious drawbacks, such as carbon build-up (coking), sulfur poisoning and low tolerance to redox cycling.
The proposed PhD project will focus on developing highly electronically conducting perovskite electrode materials that provide high performance with hydrocarbon and sulphur containing fuels in intermediate temperature (500-700 oC) solid oxide fuel cells (IT-SOFCs). The role of the PhD candidate will be to design new mixed ionic electronic conducting materials with high electrocatalytic activity for fuel oxidation. Within this area of research, you will master wet chemical methods, SOFC fabrication and measuring techniques. To gain insights into these materials advanced characterizations methods (i.e., XRD, SEM, TEM, XPS, etc.) will be applied for structural characterization of these anode materials.