Engineering of materials for solid oxide fuel cells and other energy and environmental applications

The search for cleaner environmentally friendly power sources has been one of the hot topics in research over the past few years. Solid oxide fuel cells can be considered a promising option for the production of clean energy and one of the simplest routes to improve the efficiency of these devices is the microstructural engineering of component materials. In this work, an insight is provided into several cost-effective procedures of microstructural control of SOFC materials, ranging from an "eye-scale" down to the micrometre scale. The proposed procedures may be considered general and as such they can be used to optimise various materials for energy and environmentally related areas.