Nanoscale yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) electrolyte film was deposited by plasma-enhanced atomic layer deposition (PEALD) on a porous anodic aluminum oxide supporting substrate for solid oxide fuel cells. The minimum thickness of PEALD-YSZ electrolyte required for a consistently high open circuit voltage of 1.17 V at 500 °C is 70 nm, which is much thinner than the reported thickness of 180 nm using nonplasmatic ALD and is also the thinnest attainable value reported in the literatures on a porous supporting substrate. By further reducing the electrolyte thickness, the grain size reduction resulted in high surface grain boundary density at the cathode/electrolyte interface.

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In the present paper, we fabricated and tested anode-supported solid oxide fuelcell(SOFC) with gadolinium-doped(GDC) and yttriastabilized zirconia (YSZ) electrolyte. The bilayer electrolyte thin film, consisting of a 8 µm thick YSZ layer and a 40 µm thick GDC layer, was prepared by a simple dry-pressing with simple spray coating process which is cost-effective method. The two electrolyte layers were sintered 1400 o C together, and no crack and delamination at the interface were observed. An open-circuit voltage of 0.91 V and a maximum power density of over 218 mW/cm 2 were measured with 3% H 2 O-H 2 as fuel and air as oxidant at 600o C. The result shows that the electronic conductivity of GDC electrolyte was blocked by the thin YSZ electrolyte functional layer.

In recent years, there has been growing consideration of renewable energy especially photovoltaic devices. A silicon (Si) based solar cell is the most popularly and frequently considered among the photovoltaic devices, but its bulk thickness issue lowers the performance and hinders widespread application due to the material cost. Also, this thick nature causes difference in length between minority carrier diffusion and sufficient light absorption. To mitigate the issues there have been many recent studies on Si photovoltaic devices adopting nanostructuring strategies to enhance the performance. Therefore, we report two different approaches on recent nanostructuring techniques for photovoltaic devices; bottom-up and top-down processes, which are composed of vapor-liquid-solid, solution-liquid-solid, reactive ion etching with Langmuir Blodgett and metal assisted chemical etching. Those fabrication processes enable the fabrication of nanostructures with a highly ordered and alignment structures leading to enhance the light absorption and have an appropriate thickness of Si substrate regressing Auger recombination. The fabricated nanowire and nanocone array structures outperform existing results with light absorption exceeding 90%.