Electrochemical Analysis of a Titanate-Based Anode for Direct Carbon Fuel Cells

The grand challenge in the commercialization of direct carbon fuel cell (DCFC) technology is the development of a cost-effective and thermally stable material, which facilitates fast ionic and electronic conduction and exhibits good resistance for carbon deposition at electrodes. Titanate-based materials have high ionic and electronic conductivity at higher temperature. Perovskite anodes based on titanate and transition metals show a good catalytic activity for hydrocarbon fuels. Therefore, perovskite materials, based on lanthanum strontium and copper titanate La0.4Sr0.6CuxTi1–xO3-δ (x = 0.02, 0.04, 0.06, and 0.08), were synthesized using the sol–gel method and examined as anodes for DCFCs. The powders were analyzed using various characterization techniques. X-ray diffraction shows that the material has a cubic perovskite structure. The conductivity of the synthesized powder LS8CT was found to be 4.21 Scm–1 at 600 °C. The button cell developed using LS8CT exhibits a performance of 61mWcm–2 at 600 °C. The computational study using the Wien2k code has been performed, which shows that the Fermi level is at nonzero density of states (DOS) and reveals that the compound is metallic in nature. Therefore, no forbidden region occurs between the maxima of the valence band and minima of the conduction band. Results of DOS confirm the metallic nature of the compound. On the basis of theoretical and experimental studies, it can be depicted that substitution of Cu in La0.3Sr0.7TiO3 increases the conductivity. Therefore, a La0.4Sr0.6CuxTi1–xO3-δ perovskite material can be used as an anode for DCFCs.