Electrolyte Highway Breakthrough Unlocks Affordable Low-Temperature Hydrogen Fuel (interestingengineering.com) 58
Researchers at Kyushu University have developed a solid-oxide fuel cell that operates at just 300C, less than half the usual operating temperature. The team was able to do this by engineering a "ScO6 highway" in the electrolyte, allowing protons to move quickly without losing performance. "The team expects that their new findings will lead to the development of low-cost, low-temperature SOFCs and greatly accelerate the practical application of these devices," said the researchers in a press release. Interesting Engineering reports: "While SOFCs are promising due to their high efficiency and long lifespan, one major drawback is that they require operation at high temperatures of around 700-800C (1292F-1472F)," added the researchers in a press release. Such heat requires costly, specialized heat-resistant materials, making the technology expensive for many applications. A lower operating temperature is expected to reduce these manufacturing costs.
The team's success comes from re-engineering the fuel cell's electrolyte, the ceramic layer that transports protons (hydrogen ions) to generate electricity. Previously, scientists faced a trade-off. Adding chemical dopants to an electrolyte increases the number of available protons but also tends to clog the material's crystal lattice, slowing proton movement and reducing performance. The Kyushu team worked to resolve this issue. "We looked for oxide crystals that could host many protons and let them move freely -- a balance that our new study finally struck," stated Yamazaki.
They found that by doping two compounds, barium stannate (BaSnO3) and barium titanate (BaTiO3), with high concentrations of scandium (Sc), they could create an efficient structure. Their analysis showed that the scandium atoms form what the researchers call a "ScO6 highway." This structure creates a wide and softly vibrating pathway through the material. "This pathway is both wide and softly vibrating, which prevents the proton-trapping that normally plagues heavily doped oxides," explained Yamazaki. The resulting material achieves a proton conductivity of more than 0.01 S/cm at 300C, a performance level comparable to conventional SOFC electrolytes that run at more than double the temperature. The research has been published in the journal Nature Materials.
The team's success comes from re-engineering the fuel cell's electrolyte, the ceramic layer that transports protons (hydrogen ions) to generate electricity. Previously, scientists faced a trade-off. Adding chemical dopants to an electrolyte increases the number of available protons but also tends to clog the material's crystal lattice, slowing proton movement and reducing performance. The Kyushu team worked to resolve this issue. "We looked for oxide crystals that could host many protons and let them move freely -- a balance that our new study finally struck," stated Yamazaki.
They found that by doping two compounds, barium stannate (BaSnO3) and barium titanate (BaTiO3), with high concentrations of scandium (Sc), they could create an efficient structure. Their analysis showed that the scandium atoms form what the researchers call a "ScO6 highway." This structure creates a wide and softly vibrating pathway through the material. "This pathway is both wide and softly vibrating, which prevents the proton-trapping that normally plagues heavily doped oxides," explained Yamazaki. The resulting material achieves a proton conductivity of more than 0.01 S/cm at 300C, a performance level comparable to conventional SOFC electrolytes that run at more than double the temperature. The research has been published in the journal Nature Materials.
Funny Yesterday this (Score:2)
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The headline is misleading.
This research relates to making hydrogen fuel cells more affordable and practical.
Hydrogen fuel cells turn hydrogen and oxygen into water and electricity.
The production of hydrogen is still the bottleneck and the tech in TFA does not change that.
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It could be used in a high pressure electrolysis cell, those need proton exchange too. Shame it need Scandium.
Re:Funny Yesterday this (Score:4, Informative)
Hydrogen Dreams Fading [slashdot.org]
Hydrogen is eventually coming one day. Just not for cars. Your grandkids will probably fly on airliners running hydrogen fuel, and there will probably be big power generation facilities running it. But running it on common automobiles cheaply and efficiently is just too big a hump to get over. It's a lot easier for an airport to manage hydrogen than a gas station on the Interstate. As the Japanese have proved, you can do hydrogen automobiles, it's just really, really impractical at that vehicle size. Kind of like Chrysler's 1960's experimentation with gas turbine engines in cars. You can do it, and people will go "Oh, neat", but no one is going to buy one with the hassles involved.
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That point may come. I'm no expert but I'm going with: at least not in the first 50 years.
Production of hydrogen is the problem.
By far most hydrogen produced today is made from fossil fuels and is equally polluting.
A much smaller part of it is made by electrolysis, which is very wasteful and results in hydrogen that is 3 times as expensive as that made from methane.
So with current tech we would need massive amounts of excess green electricity to make hydrogen a better option than ICEs and BEVs.
This is besid
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The only possible approach would be to use surplus electricity from intermittent sources such as solar or wind as a store of energy, or, for industrial uses.
The first use of real green hydrogen should be to displace brown hydrogen in industrial uses. Why hasn't it happened? Because even this is not economically viable.
Re:Funny Yesterday this (Score:4, Interesting)
Hydrogen is eventually coming one day. Just not for cars. Your grandkids will probably fly on airliners running hydrogen fuel, and there will probably be big power generation facilities running it.
Airplanes are at least plausible. However, the volumetric energy density sucks, coming in at just 5.6 MJ/L unless you store it cryogenically, which isn't realistic in an airplane, compared with about 35 MJ/L for jet fuel. So if you're burning it, you'd have to increase the size of the fuel tanks by 6x. Fuel cells running electric fans are probably more efficient, and that efficiency difference might reduce that number somewhat, but probably not to break-even levels. Realistically, the efficiency difference is likely to be less than 2x, so you're still probably talking about probably a 3.5x to 4x difference in fuel tank size.
Power plants? Maybe, but only as a secondary power source by using waste heat from a nuclear plant to do thermochemical water splitting, and feeding that into a fuel cell.
As a primary fuel for power plants, it wouldn't be viable. The only way you get hydrogen is by splitting it from water or natural gas. If you split it from natural gas, you're better off burning the natural gas in terms of energy output per unit of emissions. If you split it from water, you're taking in more energy than you get back at the end.
In theory, you could use hydrogen power as a glorified chemical battery for storing power from giant solar farms and distributing it throughout the day, but in practice, you'd be better off using a battery at ~99% round-trip efficiency (assuming all DC), rather than a fuel cell at 30% to 50% round-trip efficiency.
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To use it in the winter. Just as a long-term storage. Yes it will not be very efficient, but if you don't have any other use for all that solar power why not?
30% is still better then 0%.
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Well it can be useful to use the solar/wind overproduction (in the future) from the summer to create hydrogen. To use it in the winter. Just as a long-term storage. Yes it will not be very efficient, but if you don't have any other use for all that solar power why not? 30% is still better then 0%.
My first thought was that the times when you have the most solar irradiance tend to line up pretty closely with when you need the most power for air conditioning, for the most part, but that's only true for the U.S. If you include Canada, where heat pumps have to do more work heating in the winter than cooling in the summer, that's not true.
So yeah, that's maybe plausible, if we end up using that much solar. On the flip side, if we could get past the geopolitical problems, having massive solar farms in So
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Hydrogen Dreams Fading [slashdot.org]
Hydrogen is eventually coming one day. Just not for cars. Your grandkids will probably fly on airliners running hydrogen fuel, . . .
Hindenburg. I believe it was called the Hindenburg.
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Wrong wrong wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
"300C, less than half the usual operating temperature"
If you're going to add editorial comments, get an editor who knows some physics.
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The only thing hot is the old woman's coffee."
If your coffee is 300C, you are in trouble..
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Perhaps you should learn to recognise colloquialisms. To 99.99% of people 300 is less than half of 700. No one measures in kelvins outside of the lab.
Re:Wrong wrong wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
In C it's half. In F it's only 20%. Still sloppy journalism.
But there are bigger issues, the headline mentions hydrogen fuel but the article does not relate to actual hydrogen production.
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"In C it's half. In F it's only 20%"
Irrelevant, both temps were written in C, not F.
"Still sloppy journalism."
If you want precise physical measures read Nature.
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We are the lab and we don't measure anything in Kelvins either.
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Re: Wrong wrong wrong (Score:2)
There's more. In TFA, it says 300ÂC is 500ÂF. (It's 572ÂF.)
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it's wrong, but essentially correct. The important figure here is the distance from "room temperature", because that's what thermal dissipation depends on. You get technical when deciding on the materials to use, etc., but this isn't about that (except for the claim that they could use cheaper materials).
Re:Wrong wrong wrong (Score:4)
After 40 years (Score:3)
Re:Closer to 140 years (Score:2)
From Wikipedia's Fuel Cell article:
This has been a LONG time coming! Also, unless I'm missing something, this lower-temp SOFC can also be fueled with hydrocarbons not just plain hydrogen gas.
Finally, this is the same temperature as the Sodium-Sulfur battery, so keeping it hot is NOT t
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Just one of many, many, many problems with hydroge (Score:4, Insightful)
Hydrogen is just an excuse by Big Oil to pump gas and oil as usual...
It has way to many issues to be viable in the near future - power cells are only one, storing, generation, transport - it is all much more difficult than alternatives.
Compare how sending electricity 100km compares to transporting hydrogen...
It is great to have some progress as for sure it will have some uses somewhere... but for 95% of people EVs are way to go...
Re: Just one of many, many, many problems with hyd (Score:2)
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These cells are made with another hard to find rare earth, Scandium.
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Good band name.
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Hard to produce. Scandium is relatively abundant but there are no scandium ores anywhere. No natural process concentrates it. It is produced solely as a byproduct of other mining operations and global production annually is only about 40 tons. In comparison rare earth production in total is 350,000 tons. This is one of the lowest quantities of any element that is mineable at all.
So they could scarcely have picked a worse element to have as the essential ingredient.
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It has way to many issues to be viable in the near future - power cells are only one, storing, generation, transport - it is all much more difficult than alternatives.
This device works in reverse too, taking in power to produce hydrogen. I'm thinking that's a far more valuable application than as a power source.
Hydrogen is just an excuse by Big Oil to pump gas and oil as usual...
A quick search of the web tells me about 15% of petroleum ends up as non-fuel products like lubricants, coolants, waxes, tars, asphalt, coke, and plastics. While they do a lot of cracking of hydrogen atoms off of carbon atoms to produce hydrogen for varied uses they also take hydrogen atoms to stick to carbon atoms, and other atoms like nitrogen. This was even
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The petroleum industry has to see that the future in drilling isn't all that bright. They've been making a good business out of producing chemicals.
But a fraction of the business of producing it for fuel. No industry operates on a "lets downsize by 85% over the next 50 years" plan, even if that is really necessary for everyone but their stock owners / executives.The farther they can push off the inevitable the more money ends up in the pockets of the people making all the decisions.
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Like you, I'm all for improving Hydrogen technology. I still don't understand why we aren't cracking H2 out of the excess methane that is currently "flared" off of the remote NG pump sites. I'm not certain the exact process, but in places like West Texas it sure seems like we could park a windmill next to it to provide the power, eliminating the need for extending the power grid all the way out there, or even running a pipeline although you'd have to transport the H2 eventually.
The real problem I see with
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I still don't understand why we aren't cracking H2 out of the excess methane that is currently "flared" off of the remote NG pump sites.
This is very simple. It's not profitable to capture and transport the methane from those sites. It would be even more expensive to capture it, make hydrogen from it, and transport the hydrogen.
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At least then it will be used for something instead of burning it to get rid of it.
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It would already be a big plus if they would capture it and burn it in home heaters and stuff like that.
They do this when it's profitable, they don't when it isn't.
I personally believe that they should be forced to do it whether it's profitable or not, but nobody seems to want to force Big Oil to do anything. It's easier to blame their emissions on the consumers who have no other practical choices.
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Solid oxide fuel calls can generally "autoreform" hydrocarbon fuels into their elemental parts so they don't need to run on pure hydrogen. They can run on natural gas, ethanol, methanol, even some on ammonia which doesn't emit CO2 at all. I don't know if *this* fuel cell has that flexbility but high temp fuel cells generally have it.
Gaseous hydrogen, green or otherwise, is a terrible fuel and I don't understand how any reasonable person sees a future for it.
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Hydrogen is just an excuse by Big Oil to pump gas and oil as usual...
If you are conspiracy minded AI is even better. Sucking up any additional net generating build out so that the need for fossil fuels remains the same as before. I'm pretty sure fossil fuel companies love AI and cryptocurrencies, for reasons quite unrelated to their actual utility.
So drive with 300C / 572F fuel, no thanks. (Score:2, Insightful)
Oil and gas companies (Score:2)
Its just makes it slightly easier for them to push their nonsense about hydrogen being a green fuel when in some cases its even worse than hydrocarbons for well (if its streamed from gas) to wheel CO2 released per BTU.
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It doubles as an oven!
With the appropriate heat dissipation, you can cook a thanksgiving dinner under the hood of your truck on the way to grandma's house.
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Internal parts of a gasoline engine routinely reach over 300C in normal operation. The combustion event itself can hit something like 2500C.
The temperature isn't really an issue.
=Smidge=
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The top of a piston usually operates at under 300C (the gases, of course, are hotter). Only the exhaust system gets hotter than that.
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Up until now, hydrogen people were talking about 10,000 psi tanks of hydrogen - because that's the point where the energy density starts to match petroleum fuels.
The question is really, why would we ever care about commerical hydrogen at all, when we have electric batteries pretty sewn up for now.
I can power my house and my car off a battery not much bigger than the filing cabinet sitting next to me now. What makes anyone think we need to worry about anything but shrinking that down a little more?
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Batteries are probably approaching their limit. I doubt that another factor of 2 reduction in size/power is possible. Super capacitors seem to have stalled out (probably on fabrication problems). I haven't heard anything about hydrogen storage in zeolites for a decade (of course I haven't been looking). Wireless power transmission pretty much needs to be point-to-point, or there's no way to bill for it.
OTOH, we really need a good power store that doesn't release carbon dioxide. All I've been able to th
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Wait until you find out what temperature gasoline burns at in an engine.
Does it really? (Score:2)
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Normal batteries can't fuel of the energy requirement for aviation and shipping. Primary metal air batteries could in theory, but you need electrolysis to recycle those too after they are spent, at equally poor efficiency.
As for synthetic fuel, that would have to compete with plain hydrogen and in many niches would lose the fight. Hydrogen forklifts prove the problems are somewhat exagerated.
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For the rest batteries are better.
Or trains with just overhead wires instead of diesel locomotives.
Re: Does it really? (Score:3)
Nope (Score:2, Insightful)
But wait, there's more! "Valuable chemicals." (Score:1)
From the fine article: "reactors that convert CO2 into valuable chemicals"
What kind of "valuable chemicals" would those be? Octane? Cetane? Methane? Propane? That's what comes to mind for me.
Whenever hydrogen fuel cells are discussed on Slashdot I'll see numerous people jump to conclude the intended target is for vehicles. In my mind if it is for vehicles then it is for space vehicles, not something for the average commute or for any kind of over the road travel. If you have hydrogen and you need it
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Could be used for forklifts in 24/7 applications, the need for the fuel cell to heat up isn't really relevant if it runs continuously.
Even though it's not a proper application, it might be used for some experimental class in LeMans. SOFC can more easily be used for extreme power densities than PEM.
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Hydrogen needs more maintenance, have to be fueled. And the fuel is way more expensive then just battery powered ones.
Also the problem that fuel cells have water as a byproduct. Not something you want in a distribution hall.
Especially in halls that are close to/under freezing temperature.........
This ship has sailed (Score:2)
Crustal abundance (Score:2)
As always, check crustal abundance [wikimedia.org]. Ok for titane, but Sc and Sn are as rare as Colbalt. Sourcing cobalt is not that easy right now.