A New Material Which Makes Fuel Cells 50% More Efficient
By Nick May 19, 2008
Researchers from MIT have announced that they managed to improve fuel cell efficiency with more than 50 percent. The new technology could be very helpful for portable electronics and the key for this discovery was a new material.
“Our goal is to replace traditional fuel-cell membranes with these cost-effective, highly tunable and better-performing materials,” said Paula T. Hammond, Bayer Professor of Chemical Engineering and leader of the research team.
The type of fuel cells that the researchers improved are the DMFCs or direct methanol fuel cells and they are called like this because they use methanol as fuel. The best part of the DMFCs is that they only waste water and CO2 (in a very small amount), and methanol is a liquid which makes it safer to transport and store than hydrogen-gas.
The drawbacks of the DMFCs are their costs because the Nafion (the material used for the electrolyte) is very expensive, and also, the Nafion is permeable to methanol which means that a part of the fuel is wasted. The MIT researchers based their new fuel cells on layer-by-layer assembly and now, the alternative material is two times less permeable than Nafion.
The MIT researchers coated Nafion with their new material which resulted in a 50 percent more efficiency, but now the engineers are trying to find out if the alternative material can be used for itself and replace Nafion. The new material could be used for batteries, but in the future could be used in photovoltaics.
Topics: Energy |
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