| Zirconia (ZrO2) and ceria (CeO2) based ceramics is widely applied in electrochemical devices due to its high ionic conductivity coupled with high mechanical properties. Nowadays, the task of the decrease in the working temperature of such devices is of current interest, there are a lot of papers dealing with this problem. The present paper considers the conductivity vs composition dependencies for such ceramics, it is shown that triple systems are very perspective compositions, especially with hafnium oxide additions. The effect of ceramics microstructure on the conductivity is discussed, in particular the dependence of the grain size on the electrochemical properties, a special attention is paid to nanosized ceramics. Experimental results obtained in this field are compared with those computed using BLM model for microsized case and n-GCM model for nanosized one. The data on the grain size effect on the ceramics mechanical properties are summarized, it is shown that the decrease in the grain size usually results in the ceramics hardening. |
full paper (pdf, 624 Kb)