Fuel Cell Nation

European Hydrogen Storage

Prof. Duncan H Gregory is on a roll. Not only is he a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow (Scotland), and landed a job as Scientific Consultant with the startup Hydrogen Horizons, but he has recently teamed with European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS).

EADS Innovation Works recently issued the press release Nanotechnology could pave the way for hydrogen fuels where they announce their receipt of funding from the Materials Knowledge Transfer Network - part of the UK Technology Strategy Board - and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). This funding will allow the team of EADS IW, Hydrogen Horizons, and University of Glasgow to pay a student to carry out a four year PhD project on replacing the "current" PCT patent-pending Hydrisafe metal hydride material with a more advanced material. The release also describes the current Hydrisafe storage material as being the commercially available lanthanum nickel hydride (LaNi₅H₆) - certainly not very experimental at all! So did Hydrogen Hoirzons recently apply to patent a commercially-available material?

A read of the Hydrogen Horizons PCT application A hydrogen containing tank shows a fairly weak patent application. Dr. Fredy Ornath, CEO of Hydrogen Horizons, is the only listed inventor, and he provides no data/description/claims on what really counts - the composition and performance of the hydrogen storage material! In other words, it is basically a heat transfer patent.

Wanting to find if they really have something in the pipeline, some Googling uncovered this presentation from 3 years ago:

Applied Hydrogen Inc. - Solid Hydrogen Packaging for Vehicles, Utilities and Merchant Delivery
From The Israel Export & International Cooperation Institute. 

Now it looks like some double-dipping is going on - many of the slides in this Applied Hydrogen Inc. presentation match those in the previous link to a Hydrogen Horizons presentation. Plus, many of the founders and technical people are the same in Hydrogen Horizons and Applied Hydrogen Inc. I hope that Prof. Gregory and EADS know what they are getting into...

Interesting Pizza Seminar

Myoungbae Lee, a postdoc at the Virginia Tech Department of Chemical Engineering (Jim McGrath's group), was recently at Giner to work with some of our specialized membrane characterization equipment. He made a presentation for us while he was here at one of our periodic Pizza Seminars, which expanded on Effects of block length and solution-casting conditions on the final morphology and properties of disulfonated poly(arylene ether sulfone) multiblock copolymer films for proton exchange membranes.

We got to hear some of his latest results concerning details of his work with us on a DOE Fuel Cell project. The VT multiblock copolymer materials are a potential future source of low-cost proton exchange membrane (PEM). Though specifically addressing the effect of various (thermal and other) treatments on the properties of the VT membranes, it helped give us insight into other PEMs, including Nafion (today's baseline fuel cell membrane).

Go Stanford!

Yi Cui, Craig S. Riddle, Xing Xie, and Stanford coworkers prepared a highly porous, conductive, biocompatible microbial fuel cell (MFC) anode material by intimately blending carbon nanotubes with a porous textile made of randomly intertwined 20-μm-diameter polyester fibers (ACS Article.) The new MFCs generated a maximum current density that is 157% higher and a maximum power density that is 68% higher than traditional MFCs. So it appears that these fuel cells are getting a little closer to the realm of practicality.

DOE - Why Cost Sharing?

A week ago the U.S. Department of Energy came out with a solicitation announcement for up to $74 million in funding to support the research and development of fuel cells for stationary and transportation applications. Why do they have 20% cost sharing for the Fuel Cells R&D topic area, when fuel cells are not yet commercial! I thought their job was to promote not-yet-commercial technologies, and get cost sharing when doing demonstrations?