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New Catalyst May Be a Boost For Fuel Cells
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Nov 02, 2007 03:37 PM
from the don't-forget-to-reverse-the-polarity dept.
from the don't-forget-to-reverse-the-polarity dept.
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."
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A New Way To Make Water, And Fuel Cells 107 comments
Roland Piquepaille writes "You probably know that it is easy to combine hydrogen and oxygen to make water. After all, this chemical reaction is known for more than two centuries. But now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have discovered a new way to make water. As states the UIUC report, 'not only can they make water from unlikely starting materials, such as alcohols, their work could also lead to better catalysts and less expensive fuel cells.' But be warned: don't read the technical paper itself. It could win an obfuscated contest — if such a contest existed for scientific papers." Yet another advance in fuel cell technology; we discussed a different one just the other day.
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enough with the fuel cell (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:enough with the fuel cell (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [arstechnica.com] 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.
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Price is the answer (Score:2)
Right now, you can drill a hole in a pipeline anywhere in the wild and steal millions of Euros worth of gasoline. Now, if only gasoline had a price high enough to compensate the risk of getting caught...
Re:enough with the fuel cell (Score:5, Funny)
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Also, the Tesla car is hardly anything remarkable. It costs $100,000 and is basically just a Lotus Elise/Opel Speedster with an electric drive-train re
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That's great you have a Tesla, I'm just saying it's nothing like a mass production car -- it's a Lotus Elise/Opel Speedster with the drive-line swapped for electric and new bodywork. That's a terrific chassis and I hear the batteries are the newest and the propulsion system great too.
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Seriously, enough is enough (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Requires a complete infrastructure rework, just like electric would.
2. Still lower efficiency.
3. Harder to implement in a vehicle, requiring much more exotic material for efficient energy storage vs. battery tech we already have.
I just want an electric car. Ok, actually, I want an affordable (sub-40k) Tesla Roadster-style car, but with four seats and a trunk.
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Cars will move off of oil when someone figures out a better energy storage device than anyone has yet. Chemical batteries just don't provide an energy density acceptable to most consumers. Other forms of high-density energy storage are far more dangerous than gasoline, and so are impractical for cars.
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Show me a fuel cell that can break 50% efficiency when you include the electrolysis process. Lithium cells are already well over 90%. "Making power" means being over 100% efficient.
A fuel cell is just a fancy battery, and not a particularly good one.
Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Platinum-Rich (Score:2, Informative)
Platinum batteries? (Score:2)
RTFA: They crossed that $ threshold (Score:4, Insightful)
The point of the article is that
- the previous Platinum-based catalyst was about 6 times too expensive to be practical for an automotive application, while
- this one is more than a factor of 6 cheaper, putting it in the running.
In other words they've crossed the affrordability threshold.
If the lifetime testing works out, no roadblocks show up, and something better doesn't come along and obsolete it before it gets deployed, expect this one to actually show up in cars.
Parent
Stupidest comment in years (Score:3, Insightful)
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Probably a better method... (Score:3, Informative)
Oh boy. (Score:2)
You clearly don't understand (Score:2)
Gasoline Fuel Cells (Score:4, Insightful)
Bah (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see how this will do anything to ease the reliance on gasoline. A fuel cell isn't a power source per se - the power still comes from whatever you're feeding it. Whatever you're using as a fuel still requires a power input. This won't do a damn thing for energy independence unless it's coupled with a massive nuclear power plant construction program. And don't go on about wind and solar - even maxed out they barely make a dent.
When that nuclear program finally starts, it's gonna be another decade, at least, before we see any benefit. So assuming they get whatever kinks they have out of the process today, and assuming auto manufacturers rush headlong into production (five year delay), and assuming ignorant opposition ot nuclear power can be overcome in those five years, the earliest this will have any displacement effect on oil is fifteen years from now.
Which, in all practicality, means we'll all be dead before any of this happens.
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I don't see how this will do anything to ease the reliance on gasoline. A fuel cell isn't a power source per se - the power still comes from whatever you're feeding it. Whatever you're using as a fuel still requires a power input. This won't do a damn thing for energy independence unless it's coupled with a massive nuclear power plant construction program.
How about a coal power plant program? I mean, I realize your agenda is clearly "clean power", but you've slipped into another sometimes-overlapping agenda (really the "foreign oil dependence" one), and this really would make a change in that one. I think you'll find that if you can surpress the need to sound off on your personal set of agendas, you might find yourself able to better engage in thoughtful sociopolitical discourse.
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The available solar energy on Earth more than 5,000 times [wikipedia.org] the total amount of energy used by all mankind. It's a pretty big dent. Oh, and wind energy is "only" 200 times.
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Re:OK, I've gotta ask (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Original Journal Articles (Score:5, Informative)
Efficient Oxygen Reduction Fuel Cell Electrocatalysis on Voltammetrically Dealloyed Pt-Cu-Co Nanoparticles (Strasser et al., Angewandte Chemie International Edition)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200703331 [doi.org]
Electrocatalysis on Bimetallic Surfaces: Modifying Catalytic Reactivity for Oxygen Reduction by Voltammetric Surface Dealloying (Koh & Strasser)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja0742784 [doi.org]
To fully answer that question would take a whole course on organometallic chemistry to explain, but it has to do with the d-electron configuration of the platinum, (d8), which results in organometallic compounds which can be either square planar or octahedral. The ability to switch between these structures (and related oxidation states) allows for transitions and bonding between the states which allows for the creation of intermediates necessary for catalytic reactions. Bulk platinum (i.e. as a heterogeneous catalyst [wikipedia.org]) also has d-electrons available at the metal surface which can form bonding and anti-bonding ( = bond breaking) bonds with small molecules. Essentially when it is reacting with, say, hydrogen gas, the H2 adsorbs onto the surface and, each atom forming a bond with one Pt atom's d-orbital [wikipedia.org].
A good book might be Heterogeneous Catalysts for the Synthetic Chemist (Google Book Search) [google.com]
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Create a practical fuel cell vehicles, own the patents, use you influence to ban combustion vehicles.
Welcome to trillion dollar land.
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Re:Who's car? (Score:5, Informative)
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...
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Hydrogen is everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)
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One step back, two steps forward (Score:2)
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I had been under the impression though that most fuel cells could work both ways. If you applied electricity, you could get hydrogen out.
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Add a magic battery to the mix, and now you don't need the power company *or* the gas station, you just need a new roof. This kind of self-sufficiency is very appealing in muc
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Now, if you could pair hydrogen generation up with solar/wind power, we'd be ahead (by how much could be debated -- with all the areas of the US (not to mention other areas) under serious drought conditions now, using the water we do have would be silly,
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No, that's only done in the food industry, where hydrogen cannot be contaminated by carbon monoxide. The lowest cost way to produce hydrogen is to run a stream of superheated steam over red-hot coal. Carbon combines with the oxygen in the water molecules, releasing hydrogen in the exchange.