Enabling Fuel Cell Adoption
The Opportunity
Fuel cells offer the potential for higher efficiency and dramatically reduced emissions when compared with combustion-based power generation technologies.
Fuel cell technologies are already being deployed in stationary applications, such as backup power for telecommunications and data centers, and transportation applications, such as fuel cell forklifts, buses and cars. Fuel cells offer high reliability and increased resiliency in stationary applications and reduced emissions and higher efficiency in transportation applications.
The Challenge
Reducing the cost of fuel cells is the primary challenge facing the industry. Developing more efficient catalysts that require little or no expensive metals such as platinum, or improving the fuel cell’s durability and performance over its lifetime will greatly reduce cost and enable widespread adoption of fuel cells.
Argonne Innovations
Employing teams of world-class scientists and engineers with access to unique facilities, such as the Advanced Photon Source, the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, and the Center for Transportation Research, Argonne is addressing these challenges on multiple fronts:
- Catalyst development: Argonne scientists have developed some of the highest activity platinum-based and Platinum Group Metal (PGM)-free fuel cell catalysts to date. These catalysts reduce or eliminate the platinum content, significantly lowering the fuel cell cost.
- Degradation studies: Argonne’s degradation studies using in-situ X-ray techniques at the Advanced Photon Source provide a better understanding of catalyst degradation mechanisms to help developers increase durability and performance.
- Modeling: Argonne’s modeling efforts range from modeling water transport to modeling the fuel cell system performance and efficiency. Argonne’s transport modeling coupled with our X-ray tomography characterization are helping optimize water transport in the fuel cell to improve performance. Recent system modeling efforts have provided insight into tradeoffs between operating pressure, compressor power demands, and system cost.
- Vehicle testing: Argonne’s dynamometers can evaluate the performance of fuel cell vehicles under a wide range of environmental and driving conditions to determine component and system efficiencies.
The Benefits
Argonne research and technologies are leading to fuel cells that cost less, last longer, and are more durable, which will help enable widespread adoption.
Case Studies
Nanoparticle catalyst development
Argonne has developed a series of PtNi nanoparticle catalysts, ranging from core-shell-type catalysts with Pt skins, to excavated nanoframe catalysts with improved activity and durability. Utilizing the Materials Engineering Research Facility, Argonne is preparing these materials in multi-gram quantities for testing
in MEAs.
After scale-up, Argonne’s multi-layered Pt skin catalyst particle has demonstrated mass activity more than six times higher than that of commercial Pt/C in RDE testing and exceeds U.S. Department of Energy mass activity targets in testing in an MEA. Higher activity structures, such as the excavated nanoframe catalysts, are now being scaled up.
PGM-free electrocatalysts in fuel cells
The electrocatalysts used in current fuel cell systems are based on precious group metals, making them expensive and making it difficult to develop fuel cells that are cost-competitive with traditional power sources.
As part of the ElectroCat consortium, Argonne is addressing this barrier by accelerating the development and deployment of platinum group metal-free (PGM-free) electrocatalysts in fuel cells. Using high-throughput and combinatorial approaches, Argonne has synthesized, characterized, and screened the oxygen reduction reaction of new PGM-free catalysts, resulting in a PGM-free catalyst composition with twice the activity of the baseline catalyst material in a fraction of the time it would take with traditional approaches.