Event
MSE Seminar Series: Sossina Haile
Friday, April 29, 2016
1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m.
Room 2110, Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Building
JoAnne Kagle
301-405-5240
jkagle@umd.edu
Sossina Haile
Walter P. Murphy Professor of
Materials Science and Engineering
Northwestern University
New Insights into Oxygen Electrochemical Reactions on (La,Sr)MnO3
Lanthanum strong manganite is the canonical cathode for solid oxide fuel cells. It offers a valuable balance between electrochemical activity, chemical stability, and thermomechanical compatibility with the widely used electrolyte, yttria stabilized zirconia (YSZ). Despite its widespread implementation, questions regarding the reaction pathway for oxygen electroreduction on this material remain open. Here, a fundamental study of the reduction mechanism is carried using thin film methods. Libraries of (La0.8Sr0.2)0.95MnO3+δ (LSM) thin film microelectrodes with systematically varied thickness or growth temperature were prepared by pulsed laser deposition, and a novel robotic instrument was used to characterize these libraries in automated fashion by impedance spectroscopy. All impedance trends are consistent with a reaction pathway involving oxygen reduction over the LSM surface followed by diffusion through the film and into the electrolyte substrate. The surface activity is found to be correlated with the number of exposed grain boundary sites, which decreases with either increasing film thickness (at constant growth temperature) or increasing film growth temperature (at constant thickness). These findings suggest that exposed grain boundaries in LSM films are more active than exposed grains towards the rate-limiting surface process, and that oxygen ion diffusion through polycrystalline LSM films is faster than several prior studies have concluded.
