“…Retardation of such mass transfer can be explained by a 'siteblocking' mechanism (Amissah et al, 2007, Cheng et al, 2008, Priester, 1989, Korinek et al, 1994 and/or grain boundary strengthening (Yoshida et al, 2002, Buban et al, 2006. Under the oxygen potential gradients used in this study, it was found that oxygen diffusitivity was unaffected by 0.05 mol% lutetia-doping (Matsudaira et al, 2010), and even for 0.2 mol% doping, the retardation was small compared to the effect in uniform environments. This may be related to the generation of a large number of oxygen vacancies in the vicinity of the grain boundaries under an oxygen potential gradient, despite the fact that Lu 3+ is isovalent with Al 3+ .…”