Jan
19
A New Milestone For Fuel Cell Cost
January 19, 2016 | Leave a Comment
The transport sector – which includes passenger cars, trucks, buses, and rail, marine, and air transport – accounts for more than 20% of America’s energy use, mostly in the form of fossil fuels, so the search is on for environmentally friendly alternatives.
The two most promising current candidates for cars are fuel cells, which convert the chemical energy of hydrogen to electricity, and rechargeable batteries.
The University of Delaware’s Yushan Yan believes that fuel cells will eventually win out.
Yan, Distinguished Engineering Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering said, “Both fuel cells and batteries are clean technologies that have their own sets of challenges for commercialization. The key difference, however, is that the problems facing battery cars, such as short driving range and long battery charging time, are left with the customers. By contrast, fuel cell cars demand almost no change in customer experience because they can be charged in less than 5 minutes and be driven for more than 300 miles in one charge. And these challenges, such as hydrogen production and transportation, lie with the engineers.”
The biggest challenge fuel cells do face is very high cost. He and colleagues recently reported a breakthrough that promises to bring down the cost of hydrogen fuel cells by replacing expensive platinum catalysts with cheaper ones made from metals like nickel. The work has been published in Nature Communications.
The paper reports that a non platinum hydroxide exchange membrane fuel cell is hindered by the lack of a hydrogen oxidation reaction catalyst at the anode. The team showed that a composite catalyst, nickel nanoparticles supported on nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes, has hydrogen oxidation activity similar to platinum-group metals in an alkaline electrolyte.
(a) SEM image. Scale bar, 100 nm. (b) TEM image. Scale bar, 100 nm. Inset is selected area electron diffraction pattern. (c) A magnified TEM image. Scale bar, 20 nm. (d) HRTEM images of nickel particle and CNT, respectively. Scale bars, 2 nm. Image Credit: University of Delaware, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Click image for the largest view.
Yan’s team achieved the breakthrough by switching the operating environment from acidic to basic, and they found that nickel matched the activity of platinum.
“This new hydroxide exchange membrane fuel cell can offer high performance at an unprecedented low cost,” Yan said.
“Our real hope is that we can put hydroxide exchange membrane fuel cells into cars and make them truly affordable – maybe $23,000 for a Toyota Mirai. Once the cars themselves are more affordable, that will drive development of the infrastructure to support the hydrogen economy.”
The basic switch in ph is quite a surprise. Even more interesting is the nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes are a very poor hydrogen oxidation catalyst by themselves. But when supporting the nickel nanoparticles the performance went up by a factor of 33 (mass activity) or 21 (exchange current density) relative to unsupported nickel nanoparticles.
This team is on to something that was unexpected. Right off they’re matching platinum’s performance. Now if the lifespan is long, and the build process can scale up the good professor might be right. Fuel cell efficiency and consumer fueling convenience will be features very hard competition for battery systems.
They might even find a way to exceed the efficiency and performance standard of platinum someday. Now that would be something, indeed.
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