Influence of the grain boundaries on conductivity of yttrium stabilized zirconia

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe influence of the grain boundaries on the ionic conductivity of yttrium stabilized zirconia (YSZ) was investigated. The initially nanocrystalline samples were prepared using a tape casting process. The samples were annealed at different temperatures in the range from 1000 to 1400°C to overlap the grain size from 100nm to ∼10μm and investigated using impedance spectroscopy. Two distinct semicircles were found on all YSZ samples corresponding to the influence of the grain and grain boundary on the resistance. The activation energies for both resistances are very close (1.00 and 1.03eV correspondingly). The grain resistance does not change significantly during the annealing process, but the grain boundary resistance decreases after high temperature annealing which causes a decrease in the overall resistance of the material. The calculations show that the decrease in the grain boundary resistance is connected only with the increase in the grain size and the specific grain boundary resistance (per unit surface area of grain boundary) does not change with annealing.