Hydrogen energy is an efficient and environmentally friendly new energy source, but its widespread use is complicated by the high cost of manufacturing hydrogen fuel.
Chinese researchers recently invented a novel method for manufacturing a variety of high-performance platinum alloy catalysts, which is projected to dramatically reduce the cost of hydrogen fuel cells and accelerate their industrialization. The Xinhua News Agency reported this.
Hydrogen fuel cells use platinum-based catalysts to convert chemical energy to electricity via a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen. Platinum, a rare metal that plays a critical role in this chemical reaction, significantly increases the cost of hydrogen fuel cells.
The research was led by Liang Haiwei, a professor at China’s University of Science and Technology. He developed a sulfur-anchoring approach for the synthesis of platinum-based alloy catalysts that requires one-tenth the amount of platinum used in commercial platinum-carbon catalysts to achieve comparable fuel cell performance. It took Liang and his colleagues five years of investigation to arrive at this conclusion.
