CEC

Research

Cation disorder and vacancies in ionicly conducting ceramics

In a recent project funded by Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP), we used high-resolution 17O, 89Y, and 45Sc NMR to measure the extent of cation order/disorder in a number of different stabilized zirconium and cerium oxide ceramics, which we synthesized with 17O enrichment. We also used in-situ, high temperature magic-angle spinning (MAS) NMR to characterize the rate of exchange among oxygen sites, which is closely related to mechanisms of anionic site hopping and thus conductivity (see section below).