Phase Analysis of Cerate and Zirconate Ceramics Powder Prepared by Supercritical Ethanol Using High Temperature-High Pressure Batch Wise Reactor System

Abstract

OAbstract. One of the approaches that has been done to produce a better performance of an intermediate temperature solid oxide fuel cell (IT-SOFC) is by varying the synthesis methods. This paper focused on the proton conducting electrolyte in particularly barium cerate and barium zirconate system namely BaCe0.9Y0.1O3-δ (BCY) and BaZr0.9Y0.1O3-δ (BZY). Supercritical ethanol processing technique is one of the alternative synthesis routes that able to produce ceramics powder at lower calcination temperature. The samples were synthesized in High-Pressure-High-Temperature (HP-HT) Batch Wise reactor system using ethanol as reaction medium. XRD was used to study the structure of both samples and all the data were refined using Rietveld refinement method by X’pert Highscore software. VESTA software is used to observe the crystal structure for both BCY and BZY samples. Both BCY and BZY have 98.16% and 96.55% purity after being calcined at 700°C and 1100°C, respectively. This study showed that BCY has orthorhombic structure with lattice parameter a=8.76Å, b=6.24Å and c=6.21Å and BZY exhibited cubic structure with a=b=c, and a=4.194Å. It was observed that BCY synthesized by supercritical fluid (SCF) method at reduced calcination temperature exhibited an acceptable value of lattice paramter as compared to other method that used higher processing temperature.