A small research practice. We publish notes on hard problems in industrial R&D, and we take commissioned work from teams with specific questions.
Research Note 01
The first deployed cohort of Bloom's solid-oxide stacks fell well short of the ten-year service-life expectation. Three mechanisms on the cathode side degrade the cell at once, and industry mitigation addresses only the most visible. This note works each mechanism from first principles and specifies a graded-microstructure cathode architecture that suppresses all three with minimal changes to the existing co-fire process flow.
Research Note 02
In polycrystalline electroceramic devices, the grain size sets the density of grain boundaries and triple-phase boundaries per unit volume, and several of the key device metrics scale with one of these densities per g or per g². The quadratic dependence means halving the grain size can roughly quadruple the working metric. The practical lesson has been slow to propagate from measurement into design practice.
Research Note 03
In the n-type regime of most mixed-conducting oxides, the oxygen-vacancy concentration follows pO₂^(−1/6). Designers tune composition and dopant chemistry constantly and tune the commissioning atmosphere almost never. The commissioning pO₂ is a design variable that most engineering teams leave fixed at the manufacturing default.
Research Note 04
Sub-percent additions of yttrium or lanthanum to MCO-spinel coatings cut cation diffusion through the scale by a factor of two to three. The reactive-element effect is sixty years old and still missing from most commercial interconnect specifications.
Research Note 05
Sr-doped perovskite cathodes in both SOFC and solid-oxide electrolyzer designs lose active surface area continuously through strontium segregation driven by bulk lattice thermodynamics. Surface strontium reacts with atmospheric CO2 and water to build a strontium-rich skin that is electrochemically inert, degrading oxygen-reduction kinetics independent of any external chromium exposure. This note works the mechanism from first principles and specifies two suppression routes that compose: A-site under-stoichiometry in the composition, and praseodymium-oxide infiltration on the finished surface.
Research Note 06
Garnet solid electrolytes such as Ta-doped LLZO carry high bulk ionic conductivity and are a leading candidate separator for solid-state lithium batteries that would replace today's flammable liquid electrolytes. Lithium metal still grows dendrites through the separator in practice. One published mechanism attributes this to the grain-boundary band gap, which runs smaller than the bulk and permits localized electron conduction capable of reducing lithium cations inside the ceramic. This note works out the GB-vs-bulk electronic-structure contrast and specifies grain-boundary complexion engineering that closes the electron-conducting pathway responsible for internal Li+ reduction.
Research Note 07
Base-metal-electrode multilayer ceramic capacitors are manufactured under reducing atmosphere to prevent oxidation of the nickel inner electrodes. The same reducing atmosphere creates oxygen vacancies in the barium-titanate dielectric. Under DC bias at service temperature, those vacancies migrate toward the cathode and accumulate as a semiconducting layer at the electrode interface, lowering the Schottky barrier and eventually failing the capacitor. This note derives the vacancy-migration physics and identifies the rare-earth dopant range that pins vacancies without collapsing permittivity, giving a dopant-level window that extends life without sacrificing K.
Research Note 08
Nickel-YSZ cermet anodes lose active triple-phase-boundary density over time through Ni surface diffusion and steam-mediated vapor transport. The mechanism sets the baseline degradation floor of every Ni-YSZ anode-supported SOFC system and is only partially mitigated by commercial stack designs. This note compares two suppression routes: dispersed GDC nanoparticle pinning inside the conventional Ni-YSZ microstructure, and the substitution of a perovskite host lattice that exsolves Ni nanoparticles on reduction and anchors them against coarsening. Specifies which route fits which stack-architecture constraint.