With the launch of its Catalyst Discovery Engine (CDE), H2U Technologies hopes to scale the green hydrogen economy quickly.
The patented CDE promotes the search for cheaper and more abundant catalyst substitutes for the expensive and inaccessible platinum group metals (PGM) used in electrolyzers to create hydrogen. In comparison to any other technology, H2U’s CDE can create and evaluate readily accessible catalyst compounds 10,000 times faster. This increase in speed is important since the world only has roughly one-tenth of the iridium required to supply the fast rising demand for hydrogen electrolyzers worldwide.
Electrolyzers can create green hydrogen, a carbon-free fuel that can meet many of the clean energy demands of today, using only water and renewable electricity. Electrolyzers separate water into its hydrogen and oxygen components to create hydrogen. But electrolyzers need catalysts to start this reaction. These catalysts are crucial to the process of producing hydrogen. Utilizing its CDE, H2U is creating a variety of new catalysts that could take the place of pricey, scarce elements like iridium.
A $122 million Department of Energy (DOE) funding helped the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) develop the CDE, a quick screening procedure. Scientists may create, describe, and measure the catalytic activity of tens of thousands of material compositions each week using this data-driven, high-throughput method. The hunt for the ideal catalysts is then improved and guided by H2U scientists using big data analysis to shut the loop in a never-ending cycle of improvement.
Hundreds of thousands of substances were evaluated by H2U in order to find and create dozens of functional non-iridium electrocatalysts, which were then assembled into membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) and cells. These materials, which are easily obtainable domestically, have undergone internal testing as well as external evaluations under typical PEM electrolyzer operating settings.
