@article{8f80ae211ebd4bf0a78ad2bb24aadec3,
title = "Promotion of water-mediated carbon removal by nanostructured barium oxide/nickel interfaces in solid oxide fuel cells",
abstract = "The existing Ni-yttria-stabilized zirconia anodes in solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) perform poorly in carbon-containing fuels because of coking and deactivation at desired operating temperatures. Here we report a new anode with nanostructured barium oxide/nickel (BaO/Ni) interfaces for low-cost SOFCs, demonstrating high power density and stability in C 3 H 8, CO and gasified carbon fuels at 750°C. Synchrotron-based X-ray analyses and microscopy reveal that nanosized BaO islands grow on the Ni surface, creating numerous nanostructured BaO/Ni interfaces that readily adsorb water and facilitate water-mediated carbon removal reactions. Density functional theory calculations predict that the dissociated OH from H 2 O on BaO reacts with C on Ni near the BaO/Ni interface to produce CO and H species, which are then electrochemically oxidized at the triple-phase boundaries of the anode. This anode offers potential for ushering in a new generation of SOFCs for efficient, low-emission conversion of readily available fuels to electricity.",
author = "Lei Yang and Yongman Choi and Wentao Qin and Haiyan Chen and Kevin Blinn and Mingfei Liu and Ping Liu and Jianming Bai and Tyson, \{Trevor A.\} and Meilin Liu",
note = "Funding Information: This material is based on work supported as part of the HeteroFoaM Center, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences (BES) under Award Number DE-SC0001061. The authors acknowledge the use of the SHaRE User Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL, sponsored by the Scientific User Facilities Division, US-DOE-BES) and the X14A beamline at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL, partially sponsored by the US-DOE-EERE, Vehicle Technologies Program, through the HTML User Program at ORNL). The DFT calculations were undertaken at BNL (supported by the US-DOE-BES under Contract No. DE-AC02-98CH10886) using the computational facilities at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center and at BNL{\textquoteright}s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN). The authors acknowledge partial support of the WCU program at UNIST and US National Science Foundation (under Grant No. MRI-0722730), Dr Karren More and Ms Dorothy Coffey of SHaRE at ORNL for TEM instrumentation support, and Professor M.C. Lin for CPU time.",
year = "2011",
doi = "10.1038/ncomms1359",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "2",
journal = "Nature communications",
issn = "2041-1723",
publisher = "Nature Research",
number = "1",
}