Abstract

Reducing the working temperature of solid oxide fuel cells is critical to their increased commercialization but is inhibited by the slow oxygen exchange kinetics at the cathode, which limits the overall rate of the oxygen reduction reaction. We use ab initio methods to develop a quantitative elementary reaction model of oxygen exchange in a representative cathode material, La_0.5Sr_0.5CoO_3−δ, and predict that under operating conditions the rate-limiting step for oxygen incorporation from O₂ gas on the stable, (001)-SrO surface is lateral (surface) diffusion of O-adatoms and oxygen surface vacancies. We predict that a high vacancy concentration on the metastable CoO₂ termination enables a vacancy-assisted O₂ dissociation that is 10²–10³ times faster than the rate limiting step on the Sr-rich (La,Sr)O termination. This result implies that dramatically enhanced oxygen exchange performance could potentially be obtained by suppressing the (La,Sr)O termination and stabilizing highly active CoO₂ termination.