George Burton

Advanced Nanoscale Characterization of Grain Boundaries in a Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Electrolyte

BIO:

George Burton is a PhD Candidate in Materials Science at the Colorado School of Mines. He obtained his B.S. in Physics from Georgetown University (2013), and spent one year before graduate school working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD.

Receiving the CoorsTek Fellowship in 2016, his research has been focused on advanced characterization of ion-conducting ceramics. Particularly, he is working on structure-property relationships of grain boundaries using correlative atom probe tomography and electron microscopy.

ABSTRACT:

Due to their advantageous ionic conductivity, oxides are used in a wide variety of applications including energy conversion, sensing, energy storage, and gas separation. Conduction in these ceramic materials is severely limited by grain boundaries (GBs), which exhibit local chemistry and structure variations at the nanometer scale. Due to the challenges related to directly quantifying the chemical composition, particularly oxygen, across general three-dimensional boundaries, atom probe tomography (APT) is one of the only techniques available.

APT is an imaging time of flight mass spectrometry technique that allows for the characterization of materials with near atomic level spatial resolution and parts-per-million (ppm) chemical resolution. In this talk, deviations in concentration of oxygen, cations, and impurities at GBs in a model solid oxide fuel cell electrolyte are studied. The relation between the local GB composition to electrical conductivity and performance will be discussed.