Conductivity Characterizationof Iron Oxide Doped 8 mol% Yttria Stabilized Zirconia

A facile strategy was proposed to incorporate the dopant Fe into 8YSZ-based material, which can be potentially applied as solid electrode materials for Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFC). In this study, 8YSZ powder was investigated in terms of densification, conductivity and thecrystal structure as a solid electrolytes. Therefore, varying mol% of Fe included 1, 2, and 3 were prepared for investigation. The crystalline structure of the pristine and Fe doped samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and the phase contents were evaluated by using the Rietveld method. Rietveld quantitative phase analysis demonstrates that the monoclinic-ZrO2phase increases (12.8 wt% to 39.7 wt%) as the concentration of Fe increases, while the amount of tetragonal-ZrO2 phase drop (40.4 wt% to 11.9 wt%) dramatically. Sintering activity was applied to improve incorporation of the 8YSZ powder and the dopant Fe where the relative density increases from 77% to 92%. Sample YSZ-2Fe has been fitted with CPE equivalent circuit and achieved 6.251 x 10-6S/cm at 300 °C in air. However, it was found that conductivity levels decreased as the mol% of Fe increased. In short, sample YSZ-2Fe ceramic demonstrated good results in terms of densification (92.09%), cubic ZrO2 phase (22 wt%) and conductivity 6.251 x 10-6 S/cm.