New Catalyst May Be a Boost For Fuel Cells

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at the University of Houston (UH) have developed a new platinum-based catalyst for fuel cells that is at least four times more efficient and cheaper than existing catalysts. This discovery in fuel cell research may ease reliance on gasoline. According to the researchers, the active phase of the catalyst consists of nanoparticles with a platinum-rich shell and a core made of an alloy of copper, cobalt, and platinum. But it's not enough for this new catalyst to be more efficient and cheaper than a pure platinum one. It also needs to work for a long time — say, the life of a car. So far, the preliminary results look promising, but longer-term testing is needed before this kind of fuel cells can be used to power your car."

Comments

Re:OK, I've gotta ask

[fizzup]

Platinum is good at binding gas molecules to its surface (adsorbing them), which changes the nature of their electron clouds. This helps overcome the the van der Waals forces that hold them together or apart, making them more likely to react.

Nobody knows for certain just why platinum is good at adsorbing gas molecules to its surface.

Re:Who's car?

[Geoffrey.landis]

And, most notably, because fuel cells run on hydrogen, and you can't buy that at a gas station. Hydrogen is very difficult to store, because it has very low density and a high leak rate in most tanks.

In fact, fuel cells can run on other materials, e.g., methane, but this is typically done by the simple trick of using a reformer to produce hydrogen from the methane, and running that hydrogen in a fuel cell. And this can be difficult if the source of the methane is less than extremely pure; in that a lot of common impurities can poison either the catalyst or the reformer.

So, without a good means of storing hydrogen, it's not at all clear that advances in fuel cell technology are terribly useful.

Still, gotta start somewhere...

Re:enough with the fuel cell

[evanbd]

For now, it's batteries. But in the not too distant future, it may well be supercapacitors. Supercapacitors now are about a factor of ten away from lithium-ion batteries; improvements that are currently in labs appear to be able to remove most or all of that gap. Right now supercapacitors are expensive, but once the market starts growing they should come down in price. There are relatively fundamental limits to how much better traditional batteries can get in terms of capacity, but the apparent limits on supercapacitors are phenomenal. It might be 10 years before they see serious use, but I imagine small-scale use will be here sooner than that, especially if the rumors are to be believed.

Fuel cells are interesting, but I think that direct electrical storage through batteries and later supercapacitors is more likely to actually work out.