Abstract
We investigated the conductivity of high-density bulk-anatase samples with a grain size between 24 and 56 nm prepared by high pressure field-assisted sintering. When exposed to humid atmosphere, the insurgence of proton conductivity was observed for temperatures below 350 °C. Below this temperature, the samples showed a conductivity several orders of magnitude higher than that measured under dry oxygen atmosphere. The protonic conductivity strongly increased as grain size decreased, while a negligible dependence from porosity was observed when the latter ranged between 8 and 25 vol%. If compared with zirconia- and ceria-based nanomaterials with similar grain size, bulk nanometric anatase showed the highest low temperature protonic conductivity as well as the highest crossover temperature between dry and humid conduction behavior.
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This work has been funded by Fondazione Cariplo (Grant No. 2010-0435).
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Maglia, F., Tredici, I.G., Spinolo, G. et al. Low temperature proton conduction in bulk nanometric TiO2 prepared by high-pressure field assisted sintering. Journal of Materials Research 27, 1975–1981 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2012.158
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2012.158