Breakthrough: Scientists boost catalytic activity for key chemical reaction in fuel cells
UPTON, New York: Fuel cells are a promising technology for clean and efficient electrical power generation, but their cost, activity, and durability are key challenges to commercialisation.
Today’s fuel cells use expensive platinum-based nanoparticles as catalysts to accelerate the reactions. Catalysts that incorporate less expensive metals inside the nanoparticles can help reduce cost and improve activity and durability.
Now, scientists from the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, California State University– Northridge, Soochow University, Peking University, and Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics have developed catalysts that can undergo 50,000 voltage cycles with a negligible decay in their catalytic activity.
To date, the most successful catalysts for boosting the activity of the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR)—a very slow reaction that significantly limits fuel cell efficiency—have been of the platinum-based core-shell structure. However, these catalysts typically have a thin and incomplete shell (owing to their difficult synthesis), which over time allows the acid from the fuel cell environment to leach into the core and react with the other metals inside, resulting in poor long-term stability and a short catalyst lifetime.
“The goal is to make the ORR as fast as possible with catalysts that have the least amount of platinum and the most stable operation over time,” said corresponding author Dong Su, a scientist at Brookhaven Lab’s Centre for Functional Nanomaterials. — Newswise