Canadian Researchers Claim Fuel Cell Breakthrough
March 30th, 2013Via: Vancouver Sun:
Researchers at the University of Calgary say they’ve made a breakthrough that could make renewable energy much more practical and affordable.
Their paper published in the journal Science says they’ve found a much easier and cheaper way to build an electrolyzer, which uses electricity to break up water into hydrogen and oxygen, the basic requirements of fuel cells.
Fuel cells take those gases and generate energy by recombining them. Water is the only waste product. The cells are seen as a possible source of clean, reliable power that could be built on almost any scale required.
Electrolyzers depend on rare, difficult-to-work-with and sometimes toxic metals, but the method developed by Chris Berlinguette and Simon Trudel uses metals as common as rust. It delivers results comparable to current techniques but costs about 1,000 times less.
That could make it easier to use hydrogen to store intermittent energy produced by renewable sources such as wind or solar generators — cheaper, more efficient and with fewer toxic materials than the batteries currently used.
Research Credit: DF
