The main advantages of infiltration for IT-SOFC cathodes include: (1) A wide range of active materials for surface coating are allowed to be used, even for the material which is not intrinsic a good cathode material due to TEC mismatch [
8,
44]. For instance, the electronic conductivity of La
0.5Ba
0.5CoO
3-δ (LBC) at 600 ℃ in air is relatively high (
σ =1400 S/cm) as shown in
Fig. 2. However, the application of LBC (
α100-900 ℃ = 26.4 × 10
−6 K
−1) has been limited since its thermal incompatibility to most electrolyte materials (
e.g., the TEC of La
0.8Sr
0.2Ga
0.8Mg
0.2O
2.8 (LSGM) electrolyte is 12.0 × 10
−6 K
−1) [
8]. LBC infiltrated LSGM is a thermally stable SOFC cathode. The TEC of LBC infiltrated LSGM (
α100-900 ℃ =12.5 × 10
−6 K
−1) is close to that of the LSGM electrolyte, and even lower than LBC/LSGM composite (16.2 × 10
−6 K
−1). (2) Both the surface composition and the surface structure can be altered after surface infiltration [
45,
46]. The catalyst coating enables the formation of nano structures with high electro-catalytic activity due to the increased surface area and the enlarged triple-phase boundary (TPB) areas [
43,
47-
50]. (3) The infiltration method allows relatively low heat treatment temperatures (< 900 ℃) which avoids the reduction of electrocatalyst/gas and electrocatalyst/ionic conductor (IC) interfacial areas induced by the crystal particle coarsening, and minimizes reactions between the infiltrated coating material and the backbone phase. (4) Infiltration can increase the durability of cathode and the tolerance to contamination as shown in
Table 1 [
20,
44,
51-
60]. The degradation of SOFC cathode is commonly caused by the formation of secondary phases or the reactions of the segregated phases with the gas species [
56]. These secondary phases result in decreased surface (bulk) electronic conductivity [
61-
65]. The contaminants such as CO
2 [
66], H
2O [
67], SO
2 and H
2S [
56,
68] from environmental gas phases, the volatile chromium species [
55,
58] from interconnector and boron species from the sealing materials [
69] will accelerate the degradation [
68]. The surface coating introduces a surface barrier layer, which suppresses the contamination to the surface of backbones. For instance, the segregated Sr on the LSCF cathode reacts with CrO
3 to form insulating SrCrO
4, which blocks the cathode ORR active sites. Surface coating can effectively suppress the surface segregation and improve the tolerance to chromium [
55-
71]. Yang
et al. [
44] found that SrCo
0.9Ta
0.1O
3-δ acted as a Cr getter on the LSCF surface, which can mitigate Cr poisoning. In our previous work, we found that the infiltrated BaCO
3 phase was almost inert to Cr species [
20]. Currently most studies are focused on the Cr contamination of the cathode (
Table 1) [20, 44, 51-60. In addition to Cr contamination, water also influences dramatically the durability of IT-SOFCs, especially for SOFCs based on proton conductors [
72]. In future, more attentions should be paid on the water-tolerance performance of cathodes.