As the world turns to clean energy sources, it also needs to figure out how to store energy for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

One of the leading competitors, the hydrogen fuel cell, has received a major boost from basic research recently implemented in a fuel cell by the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University and the Toyota Research Institute (TRI). The device through a collaboration between Stanford and the Israeli Technion Institute of Technology. The findings were published in the journal Nature Energy.

“Hydrogen fuel cells have really great potential for energy storage and conversion by using hydrogen as an alternative fuel to, for example, gasoline,” said Michaela Burke Stevens of SLAC and Stanford University’s SUNCAT Joint Center for the Study of Interfaces and Catalysis. senior authors of the study. “But using fuel cells is still quite expensive.”

The problem, according to Burke Stevens, is that fuel cells rely on a catalyst typically filled with expensive platinum group metals (PGMs) to speed up the chemical reaction that makes the system work. This led Burke Stevens and his colleagues to look for ways to make the catalyst cheaper, but making such fundamental changes to fuel cell chemistry is a difficult task: Scientists often find that the catalyst working in their small labs doesn’t work. It’s great to see a company testing this in a real fuel cell.

This time, the researchers offset costs by partially replacing MPG with silver, a cheaper alternative; But the key was simplifying the chemical recipe used to deliver the catalyst to the cell’s electrodes. Scientists often mix a catalyst with a liquid and then apply it to a mesh electrode, but these catalyst recipes do not always work the same way with different devices in different laboratory environments, making it difficult to translate the work into real-world applications. .

“Wet chemical processes are not very robust to laboratory conditions,” said Tom Jaramillo, director of SUNCAT, which made the collaboration possible.

To solve this problem, the SLAC team instead used a vacuum chamber to deposit their new catalyst onto the electrodes in a more controlled manner. “This high-vacuum device is ‘what you see is what you get,'” Jaramillo said. “As long as your system is well calibrated, in principle people can easily reproduce it.”

To ensure that others could replicate their approach and apply it directly to full-scale fuel cells, the team worked with experts at the Technion who showed that the method worked in a practical fuel cell.

“This project was not designed to do fuel cell tests here, so we were really lucky to be contacted by José Zamora Zeledon, Dario Dekel, and doctoral student John Duglin, the lead graduate student on the Stanford University project at the Technion. They were built to test real fuel cells, so we had a It was a really good combination of resources to put together,” said Burke Stevens.

Together, the two teams discovered that by replacing some of the MPG used in previous catalysts with cheaper silver, they could produce an equally efficient fuel cell at a much lower cost, and they now had a proven method for developing catalysts. , they can start testing more ambitious ideas.

“We could try to get rid of the IGP altogether,” Jaramillo said.

Deckel, professor of chemical engineering and director of the Technion’s Grand Technion Energy Program, was equally excited about the potential of the partnership. “This has great benefits for fuel cell research in academia as well as for practical catalyst development in the fuel cell industry,” he said.

Looking ahead, Jaramillo said such research will determine whether fuel cells can fulfill their potential. “Fuel cells look really exciting and interesting for heavy-duty transportation and clean energy storage,” Jaramillo said. “But ultimately, that’s going to be the goal of this collaboration, which is to reduce costs.”