Unconventional Highly Active and Stable Oxygen Reduction Catalysts Informed by Computational Design Strategies

Discovering and engineering new materials with fast oxygen surface exchange kinetics and robust long-term stability is essential for the large-scale, economically viable commercialization of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) technology. The perovskite catalyst material BaFe0.125Co0.125Zr0.75O3 (BFCZ75), predicted to be promising from recent density functional theory (DFT) calculations and unconventional due to its extremely high Zr content and low electronic conductivity, exhibits oxygen reduction reaction surface exchange rates on par with Ba0.5Sr0.5Co0.8Fe0.2O3 (BSCF) and excellent stability at typical operating temperatures. New composite electrodes are engineered by integrating BFCZ75 with commercial electrode materials La1-xSrxMnO3 (LSM) and La1-xSrxCoyFe1-yO3 (LSCF) and achieve high performance as measured by low area specific resistance (ASR) values, with the LSCF/BFCZ75 ASR values comparable to top performing noncomposite electrode materials such as SrCo0.8Sc0.2O3-delta, BaNb0.05Fe0.95O3-delta and BaCo0.7Fe0.22Y0.08O3-delta. The use of BFCZ75 as a composite with LSCF achieving low ASR values shows that BFCZ75 is highly active and can easily integrate into existing SOFC material supply chains, lowering the barrier for potential commercial application of new electrode materials. Finally, these findings point to a broader unexplored class of perovskite materials with high fractions of redox inactive species (e.g., Zr, Nb, and Ta) that may unlock new pathways to realizing improved commercial SOFCs.