Ceramic Anode Materials for Solid Oxide Fuel Cells

固体氧化物燃料电池（SOFC）在将燃料中的化学能转化为电能方面提供非常高的效率，并且可以潜在地使用各种容易获得的烃燃料运行。固体氧化物燃料电池在高温下工作（>750 ℃），但人们对降低固体氧化物燃料电池的工作温度以降低成本和老化有相当大的兴趣。不幸的是，SOFC的性能随着操作温度的降低而迅速下降。限制当前SOFC阳极性能的问题是使用多组分复合体系来满足阳极要求。传统的固体氧化物燃料电池阳极材料存在严重的缺点，如积碳（焦化）、硫中毒和对氧化还原循环的耐受性差。拟议的博士项目将集中于开发高导电钙钛矿电极材料，在中温（500-700 oC）固体氧化物燃料电池（IT-SOFC）中提供高性能的碳氢化合物和含硫燃料。博士候选人的角色将是设计新的混合离子电子导电材料，具有高的燃料氧化电催化活性。在这个研究领域，您将掌握湿化学方法，SOFC制造和测量技术。为了深入了解这些材料，先进的表征方法（即，XRD、SEM、TEM、XPS等）将应用于这些阳极材料的结构表征。

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.