Ceria and strontium titanate based electrodes

A ceramic anode structure obtainable by a process comprising the steps of:

• (a) providing a slurry by dispersing a powder of an electronically conductive component and by adding a binder to the dispersion, in which said powder is selected from the group consisting of niobium-doped strontium titanate, vanadium-doped strontium titanate and tantalum-doped strontium titanate;
• (b) combining said slurry of the electronically conductive phase with an electrolyte;
• (c) sintering the obtained multilayer structure to provide a backbone structure to said electronically conductive phase;
• (d) providing a precursor solution of ceria, said solution containing a solvent and a surfactant;
• (e) impregnating the resulting sintered multilayer structure of step (c) with the precursor solution of step (d) to ensure penetration of the ceria precursor solution containing the surfactant into porosities of the resulting sintered structure of step (b);
• (f) subjecting the resulting structure of step (e) to calcination to form nano-sized ceria particles or crystallites that are finely dispersed within the anode structure to completely cover the surfaces of all sintered structure particles of the anode structure, and cover the surface of said backbone structure, and to enable incorporation of the nano-sized ceria particles within the formed anode structure so that the nano-sized ceria particles or crystallites form a layer completely covering all the sintered structure particles of the anode structure;
• and
• (g) conducting steps (e)-(f) at least once.