Fabrication and Characterization of Functional Ceramic Films by Solution Spray Pyrolysis: Correlations with the Thermal Decomposition Characteristics of the Constituent Salts

Abstract

Thin films of ceramic or ceramic-metal (cermet) electrodes with appropriate structure and morphology are always sought as either electrodes or electrolytes in solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) or electrolyzers (SOECs) requiring different morphological and structural characteristics for optimal function. Requirements for the electrodes and electrolytes differ in each case and these dictate operational conditions of the adopted fabrication methods. The solution spray pyrolysis fabrication technique (SSP) is based on molecular deposition and it involves spraying of a solution of suitable constituent metal salts onto a heated substrate. In the present communication, we use this technique to fabricate thin films of Gadolinia (10mole%) stabilized Ceria (CGO10) on dense Zr0.92Y0.08O2-x (YSZ) and La0.3Sr0.7FeO3 (LSF70) substrates and La0.75Sr0.25MnO3 (LSM) and CuO-CeO2 on dense YSZ substrates. Focus is on the thermal characteristics of the constituent salts with respect to correlations with the appropriate deposition temperatures as well as the effect of deposition time.

Overview of Approaches to Increase the Electrochemical Activity of Conventional Perovskite Air Electrodes

“…In general, these are mainly the low-temperature methods to maintain the high surface area of the nanosized materials. Among the variety of methods available to improve the conventional perovskite electrodes by extending the triple-phase boundary (TPB), it is worth mentioning spray pyrolysis in its different modifications highlighted in the review [273], and used for LSM in [218,219,[274][275][276][277], and for LSCF in [223,[278][279][280][281]; electrospinning represented in reviews [282][283][284], and used for LSM in [285,286], and for LSCF in [286][287][288][289][290][291][292] template method used for LSM in [293], and for LSCF in [294][295][296][297]; infiltration method considered in the reviews [298][299][300][301][302], and used for LSM in [26,54,148,154,232,[303][304][305][306][307]…”