Newly Discovered Design Rules Lead to Better Fuel Cell Catalyst

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://science.energy.gov/bes/highlights/2019/bes-2019-01-k/

02.11.19

Newly Discovered Design Rules Lead to Better Fuel Cell Catalyst

Optimized oxides made from common metals use less energy and show the potential of new design approach.

The Science

To create better batteries and fuel cells, scientists must make oxygen molecules gain and lose electrons efficiently. The reactions are frustratingly sluggish. Speeding the reactions requires heat and platinum, which are costly. Now, researchers uncovered vital design principles to engineer catalysts that use more readily available metals and less heat. The catalysts performed well and were stable over the long term.

The Impact

Scientists have been searching for better catalysts for electrodes in fuel cells and batteries. These catalysts drive reactions that move electrons to and from oxygen (known as oxygen electrocatalysis). However, creating such catalysts has been difficult. Why? Researchers used trial-and-error approaches. They needed the underlying design principles. With this information in hand, researchers can better avoid dead-ends and work on the most promising options.

Summary

Creating efficient metal-air batteries, fuel cells, and other energy conversion and storage systems depends, in part, on how quickly oxygen molecules gain and lose electrons. To make these systems commercially viable, they need catalysts that are inexpensive, active, selective, and stable. Researchers have been examining promising catalysts made from various ratios of less expensive metals. Specifically, these catalysts are layered, mixed ionic-electronic conducting oxides. The researchers showed that a calculated descriptor, how tightly oxygen binds to a spot where an oxygen atoms is missing on the catalyst’s surface, can identify the most promising structures. The team tested how well this descriptor predicted catalytic performance by synthesizing, characterizing, and testing catalysts with different descriptor values. They found that nano-sized rods made from cobalt-doped lanthanum nickelate oxide worked well in solid oxide fuel cells at around 1000 degrees Fahrenheit and were stable over the long term. The team’s results demonstrate the effectiveness of the design principles. Further, the work highlights the potential of the new catalyst and should benefit design efforts for fuel cells and batteries.

…

https://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jacs.7b11138
http://nikollalab.eng.wayne.edu/Nikolla_Research_Group/HOME.html

[NNadir]

1. If one enters the words "efficient" and "electrocatalyst" in Google scholar...

...one gets 113,000 hits in a few seconds.

More than 3,000 date from before 2000.

I have a distinct impression that personally I come across ten or twenty such papers in my general reading each month, which is not to say I actually read them.

A fuel cell is a device that releases stored energy, but has nothing to do with primary energy.

Primary energy is the problem, and all the blabber about fuel cells has nothing to do with primary energy, unless one is planning on burning even more dangerous fossil fuels.

Advocates of the failed and useless so called "renewable energy" scheme like to prattle on about energy storage - which wastes energy as can be seen in the inviolable laws of thermodynamics - but they simply can't grasp that more than half a century of prattling on about "renewable energy," all the solar and wind and geothermal, tidal blah, blah, blah, doesn't produce even 2% of the 584 exajoules of energy burned by humanity in 2017.

2018 Edition of the World Energy Outlook Table 1.1 Page 38 (I have converted MTOE in the original table to the SI unit exajoules in this text.)

The proportion of primary energy produced combustion of dangerous fossil fuels is rising, not falling.

In the year 2000, 80% of the world's energy supply at that time, 337.12 exajoules out of 420.15 exajoules, came from the combustion of oil, gas and coal. In 2017, 81%, or 472.77 exajoules out of 584.98 exajoules came from the combustion of oil, gas and coal.

In February 2000, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide recorded at Mauna Loa was 369.50 ppm.

Nineteen years later, in the week ending February 3, 2019, we were at 411.63 ppm.

Who do we think we're kidding? The atmosphere? Planetary temperatures? The pH of the ocean?

The most efficient fuel cells in the world will not make so called "renewable energy" viable or meaningful, and will not give a return on the trillions of dollars squandered on it in this century.

So called renewable energy" didn't work; it isn't working and it won't work.

It's fun to cruise the scientific literature and get all excited about this or that, but the issue before humanity is not how to store energy, thus wasting it. The issue is to produce clean primary energy, and unfortunately pop culture doesn't get it at all.

Not at all.

We just don't give a rat's ass because we refuse to hear anything we don't want to hear.