TEHRAN (INIC)- Iranian researcher together with colleagues from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden and Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Norway synthesized nanoengineered BaSrCoFeOx (BSCF) to be used in cathode of solid oxide fuel cells, smoothening the way of its commercialization.

"We synthesized a nanostructured BSCF for the first time through a co-precipitation method, following our thermodynamic studies on the critical conditions for the synthesis using home-developed software at KTH," said Mahdi Darab, Ph.D. candidate at NTNU, who has been involved in the BSCF project during his master thesis work at KTH.

"We perform researches on fuel cell technology since fuel cells are green energy conversion devices of chemical energy into electrical energy. Solid oxide fuel cells -SOFCs are totally solid state devices that have capacity to produce large amount of power to be used in power stations. The only end-products are water and carbondixoide," said Dr. M. S. Toprak, the leader of the project and associated professor at KTH in Stockholm.

Mahdi Darab explained that the research team was able to synthesize the BSCF through a quite advanced and neat method in Sweden, but unable to measure all the properties needed to prove the high promise of the nanoengineered BSCF for SOFCs there, the gap which has been perfectly filled in Norway at the characterization lab at NTNU.

"I pursued working on the samples that I received from Dr. Toprak in a lab run by Professor Kjell Wiik at NTNU and together with Guttorm Ernst Syvertsen who co-authored two papers in this project, we studied the electrical characteristics of the powder here in Norway," he said, adding, "So this way, we completed the work that I did more that two years ago in Sweden and published some scientific papers out of that."

Dr. Toprak explained to the news service of INIC that in addition to Mr. Darab's master thesis work, the team has developed a new anode materials architecture and reached very high power density values at about 600° C for the new SOFC assembled using that.

The results of the project have been partly published in Journal of the Electrochemical Society, Journal of Advanced Materials and International Journal of Hydrogen Energy.