As the global shift to renewable energy gathers momentum, a key challenge has emerged: how to efficiently store energy during periods when solar and wind power are unavailable. A breakthrough in hydrogen fuel cell technology achieved through collaborative research significantly reduces costs by replacing platinum metal in the catalyst with silver, marking an important step towards affordable and efficient green energy storage.
Hydrogen fuel cells, a leading contender, just got a big boost thanks to basic research at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, and Toyota Research Institute (TRI). A collaboration between Stanford University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology developed a fuel cell device that has recently been translated into practice.
"Hydrogen fuel cells do have great potential for energy storage and conversion, using hydrogen as an alternative fuel to gasoline and the like, but edible fuel cells are still quite expensive," said Michaela Burke Stevens, associate scientist at the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis, a joint venture between SLAC and Stanford University.
The problem, Burke Stevens said, is that fuel cells often rely on catalysts containing expensive platinum group metals (PGMs) to promote the chemical reactions that make the system work properly. This prompted Burke-Stevens and her colleagues to look for ways to make catalysts cheaper, but making such fundamental changes to a fuel cell's chemistry is a daunting challenge: Scientists often find that catalysts that work in their small lab setups don't.
This time, the researchers balanced costs by partially replacing platinum group metals with a cheaper alternative, silver. But the real key is simplifying the chemical formula for adding catalysts to battery electrodes.
Scientists typically mix catalysts into a liquid and then spread them onto mesh electrodes, but these catalyst formulations don't always work the same way in different lab settings using different tools, making it difficult to translate the work into real-world applications. “Wet chemical processes are not particularly resilient to laboratory conditions,” says Tom Jaramillo, director of SUNCAT, the company that made this collaboration possible.
To solve this problem, the SLAC team used a vacuum chamber to deposit the new catalyst onto the electrodes in a more controlled manner. "This high-vacuum tool is a 'what you see is what you get' type of approach," Jaramillo said. "As long as your system is well calibrated, in principle one could easily reproduce it."
To ensure that others could replicate their method and apply it directly to full-scale fuel cells, the team collaborated with experts from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, who demonstrated that the method works in actual fuel cells.
"This project was not set up to do fuel cell testing here, so we were very lucky." José Zamora Zeledόn, a Stanford graduate student on the project, connected with Dario Dekel and John Douglin, his doctoral student at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and their goal was to test actual fuel cells, so it was a really good combination of resources,
Together, the two teams discovered that by replacing some of the platinum group metals used in previous catalysts with cheaper silver, they could achieve equally efficient fuel cells at a much lower price—and now they had a proven approach to catalyst development with which they could start testing more ambitious ideas.
"We could try to be completely platinum-group metal-free," said Jaramillo, a professor of chemical engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and director of the Greater Technion's Energy Program, who is equally excited about the potential of the collaboration. "This has great benefits for fuel cell research as well as practical catalyst development for the fuel cell industry," he said.
Going forward, this type of research will determine whether fuel cells can reach their potential. Fuel cells are really exciting and interesting for heavy-duty transportation and clean energy storage, but ultimately it comes down to cost reduction, which is what this collaboration is about.
Compiled source: ScitechDaily