On the kinetic decomposition voltage of ternary oxides.

In a previous article the authors reported the kinetic unmixing and decomposition of the ternary oxide NiTiO by an externally applied voltage. It was found [J. Chun, et al., J. Appl. Phys., 117, 2015, 124504] that while kinetic unmixing occurred for all magnitudes of the applied voltage, kinetic decomposition occurred only above a certain threshold voltage U. The experimentally determined value of U, however, did not coincide with the thermodynamic expectation according to the definition by Gibbs (). In this work the kinetic decomposition voltage U of a ternary oxide ABO is theoretically derived and compared with the experimental results. It turns out that U depends on the mobility ratio of the cations and agrees with observed results for the system of NiTiO within the error bounds.