NANO-BREAKTHROUGH FOR AUTOMOTIVE FUEL CELLS ?

What if by some engineering miracle one part within a conventional internal combustion engine was changed that would multiply its power output by a factor of 5 without burning additional fuel? A 100 horsepower engine would suddenly put out 500. The world would change. Engines would be smaller, lighter and presumably somewhat less expensive.

Unfortunately this miracle hasn’t happened. But it MAY have for proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells. (I emphasize the “may” because the breakthrough technology doesn’t appear to have been tested in a working, off-the-shelf, fuel cell.)

There’s one part within a fuel cell that literally makes it all come together. Appropriately named it’s the catalyst. The catalyst creates the opportunity for hydrogen to combine with oxygen to make water, and while doing so momentarily allows electrons to be borrowed as flowing electric current to do real work, like turning an electric motor to drive a car to the supermarket.

Catalysts are typically made of pricey platinum (but not very much of it) adding to the cost of fuel cells and encumbering their mass adoption into vehicles and other portable uses.

Hitachi Maxell, of Tokyo, thinks it has a new catalyst solution that would be a true breakthrough if it works in the real fuel cell world. The catalyst not only uses less platinum but dramatically increases electric current producing reactions by almost that factor of five eluded to above: It encourages 4.8 times the hydrogen-oxygen combinations than a typical commercial platinum catalyst of the same unit area. The more hydrogen and oxygen combinations a catalyst can encourage the more electrons will be available for use as flowing electricity.

Hitachi Maxell, better known as Maxell, has increased those combinations by increasing the reactive surface area of the catalyst using nanosized particles of gold and platinum. (Sure, gold is pricey but its not as bad as platinum.) Nanomaterials have that wondrous capability of increasing an object’s surface area without increasing its physical dimensions.

In technical speak, Hitachi Maxell says the new gold-platinum (AuPt) catalyst is made up of nano-particles 2 to 3 nanometers in size. In the high-activity catalyst structure gold and platinum are not fully alloyed (they still remain mostly separate metals) thus allowing high oxygen-reduction reaction activity.

In street speak the dramatically more reactive catalyst means each fuel cell, and a whole stack of them, can be significantly smaller for the same electrical power output. Smaller means less materials needed for the whole fuel cell, including less quantities of gold and platinum, equating to a less expensive fuel cell. Smaller also means less weight. Smaller, too, may also mean that less hydrogen needs to be carried on board, or looking at it in another way the same amount of hydrogen now used in fuel cell vehicles would allow for longer range between refuelings - a more fuel efficient fuel cell because of the Maxell catalyst.

Maxell says this success represents a large step closer to fuel cells that are practical for applications requiring large electric current, such as automobiles and homes.

We’ll have to see however. Fuel cell developers will have to get some of the new material and try it out in a working fuel cell.

Hitachi Maxell, founded in 1960, is best known for products sold in office supply outlets. The company is a leading manufacturer of information storage media products including magnetic tapes, optical disks, and battery products including lithium ion rechargeable batteries, micro batteries and dry cell batteries.

Links:

Hitachi Maxell
http://www.maxell.com

For more detail and graph.
http://www.maxell.co.jp/e/release/20080327.html