Transport kinetics of hydrogen permeable lanthanum tungstate

The electrical conductivity relaxation technique is a widely used method to determine the oxygen transport parameters of mixed ionic-electronic conductors. In recent years, it has been modified to investigate the hydration behavior of proton conducting mixed conductors, giving access to up to four transport parameters in a single relaxation experiment, the diffusion coefficients and surface reaction rates of hydrogen and oxygen. In this work, the transport properties of the fluorite type protonic conductor lanthanum tungstate have been investigated by means of electrical conductivity relaxation. The experiments were performed in a temperature range from 650 °C to 950 °C, in a pO2 range from 3 mbar to 100 mbar and in a pH2O range from 10 mbar to 100 mbar and in dry atmosphere. At high temperatures, the conductivity relaxation curve follows the expected two-fold non-monotonic behavior upon hydration. At low temperatures, however, the contribution of the fast hydrogen kinetic decreases and by a further decrease of the temperature, the relaxation shows two-fold monotonic behavior. The power factors - the contribution of each single fold relaxation curve to the resulting two-fold relaxation curve, which is a superposition - have been derived to explain the behavior mentioned above. The activation energy of the oxygen incorporation is rather low. Hence, oxidation experiments were performed in dry atmospheres in order to investigate if the origin of the oxygen species is relevant. The results revealed higher activation energies, which was expected, but also higher absolute values of the surface reaction rate and the diffusion coefficient. Oxidation experiments with increasing humidity revealed that the increased diffusivity cannot be attributed to the total concentrations of electron holes and proton interstitials. First experiments using spectroscopic relaxation, which is dependent on the concentration of hydroxy-anions only, were performed. Absorption bands, however, have not yet been observed