Development of a High-Throughput Screening Method for Oxide-Ion Conductors and Its Application to Bismuth-Based Oxide Library Thin Films

Abstract

To accelerate material discovery, we develop a screening method for oxide-ion conductors that comprises combinatorial synthesis using chemical-solution deposition and high-throughput measurements using X-ray diffraction and conductivity. The present method allows us to form an arbitrary and uniform composition within an evaluation area at an arbitrary position in the library on a substrate. This screening method is applied to ABi2Zr x (Nb1–y Ta y )1–x O9 bismuth-layered compounds, which are known to have relatively high oxide-ion conductivities but are yet to be examined thoroughly. By making systematic thin-film libraries for A = Sr or Ca, we aim to find the optimized composition. The total time required for synthesis, phase identification, and conductivity measurements is found to be significantly shorter than that with the conventional method, and the maximum oxide-ion conductivity of this compound in the libraries reaches 10–3 S/cm at 800 °C.

Structure–property correlation in oxide-ion and proton conductors for clean energy applications: recent experimental and computational advancements

“…4 Finally, the need of discovering novel materials brought materials informatics into the eld of ion conductors with the aim of accelerating materials discovery. 5,6 In the present Review, we focus our attention on the advancements of the last decade in the eld of oxide-ion and proton conductors, encompassing materials discovery, characterization tools, and computational modelling, thus providing a critical update with respect to the state-of-the-art presented ten years ago, with particular emphasis to structure-property correlations, defect chemistry and property tuning strategies. 3 The reader is referred to previous works for more traditional ion conductors for SOFCs.…”

Identifying superionic conductors by materials informatics and high-throughput synthesis

“…The characterization of a fabricated materials library is often a bottleneck in highthroughput experiments, as it may require structural identification or measurement of physical properties. To address this problem, high-throughput methods for X-ray diffraction (XRD) and conductivity measurements have been developed to characterize combinatorial libraries 22 . To identify the phases in each library quickly, we employed synchrotron radiation with 2D detection at the SPring-8 facility 23 .…”

“…The surface and cross-section microstructures of the library films were evaluated by field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM, JSM-7000F, JEOL Ltd.). Crystal structures in the library were analysed on a high-throughput XRD system using synchrotron radiation with a wavelength of 0.8 Å at the SPring-8 facility 23 along with a 2D detector (PILATUS) 22 . Each theta scan data in the XRD measurement was taken within a few seconds.…”

“…The library was then annealed at 873 K for 30 min in air. The high-throughput measurement system comprises a pair of tungsten probes, a stage with a cartridge heater, a measurement chamber, an LCR meter (3522-50; Hioki Co., Ltd., Japan), and a control device 22 . A Cole-Cole plot of each library film was then constructed using a 3522-50 LCR meter along with spatial scanning of the library.…”

“…Each sample was heated at 873 and 973 K, and the impedance data in the frequency range 1-100 kHz with 100 mV applied voltage were automatically recorded and stored at each temperature. To calculate conductivity, we used the form factor of the interdigital Pt electrode calibrated with the conductivity of a YSZ-sputtered film 22 . Measurements were performed over the course of 5 h at 873 K to evaluate durability.…”