Design novel solid oxide electrolyte with enhanced ionic conductivity forms one of the Holy Grails in the field of materials science due to its great potential for wide range of energy applications. Conventional solid oxide electrolyte typically requires elevated temperature to activate the ionic transportation, while it has been increasing research interests to reduce the operating temperature due to the associated scientific and technological importance. Here, we report a conceptually new solid oxide electrolyte, HSrCoO2.5, which shows an exceptional enhanced proton conductivity at low temperature region (from room temperature to 140 oC). Combining both the experimental results and corresponding first-principles calculations, we attribute these intriguing properties to the extremely-high proton concentration as well as the well-ordered oxygen vacancy channels inherited from the novel crystalline structure of HSrCoO2.5. This result provides a new strategy to design novel solid oxide electrolyte with excellent proton conductivity for wide ranges of energy-related applications.
@article{arxiv.1811.10802,
title = {A protonated brownmillerite electrolyte for superior low-temperature proton conductivity},
author = {Nianpeng Lu and Yujia Wang and Shuang Qiao and Hao-Bo Li and Qing He and Zhuolu Li and Meng Wang and Jingzhao Zhang and Sze Chun Tsang and Jingwen Guo and Shuzhen Yang and Jianbing Zhang and Ke Deng and Ding Zhang and Jing Ma and Yang Wu and Junyi Zhu and Yoshinori Tokura and Ce-Wen Nan and Jian Wu and Pu Yu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.10802},
year = {2018}
}