Use of carbon nanotubes in fuel cells

29 March 2008

Recently scientists of Max Plank for Solid State Research and the University of Darmstadt of Germany created a new fuel-cell. The new fuel cell consists of single walled carbon nanotubes and it functions at par with the conventional fuel cells, however it is much lighter than the conventional fuel cell. This will therefore enhance the use of lightweight power supplies.

The conventional lightweight fuel cells are used in various portable applications including notebook computers, camera, cell phones and therefore using the new technology will further improve the light weight requirements for these applications. In general carbon in amorphous form is used in conventional fuel cell as it has good porosity and at the same time have large surface area.

A large number of single walled carbon nanotubes will also behave similarly however these will be light weight and sometimes these are ten times thinner and lighter than the conventional fuel cell electrodes. Thin shape of these carbon nanotubes have additional advantage of higher conductivity and sometimes conductivity might be ten thousand times of the conventional electrode.

Although the effeciency of the new carbon nanotube based fuel cell is expected to be quite high, however the researchers observed that it is comparable to the conventional amorphous carbon type fuel cell and one main reason for the lower performance seems to be the preparation of catalysts and researchers are tryng to optimize it.

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