Use of nanocrystals in fuel cells

13 July 2007

Fuel cells use the combination of a fuel and antioxidant. Fuel cells can have various types of fuels such as hydrocarbon, hydrogen etc and oxidant such as oxygen, air, and chlorine dioxide.

There are various types of fuel cells and the most common fuel cells include metal hydride fuel cell, electro galvanic fuel cell, direct methanol fuel cell, reformed methanol fuel cell, proton exchange membrane fuel cells, phosphoric acid fuel cell and solid oxide fuel cell.

In a typical hydrogen fuel cells, hydrogen and oxygen from air reacts to form energy. In this reaction a lot of energy is released leaving behind the combustion product water. As there are no harmful gases released from these fuel cells, these are the best fuel for new generation passenger cars and other vehicles.

The present fuel cells runs at very high temperature and in certain cases the temperature go up to 1000 degree Celsius and therefore the high temperature quickly wears out the metallic and other ceramic components. Further to this the current fuel cells also require platinum metal.

In a new approach, nanocrystals of lubic zirconia have been found more reliable in hydrogen fuel cells and at the same time as these will replace the high costly ingredients of fuel cells, the overall cost of the fuel cell will reduce significantly. The research team led by Zuhair Munir, professor of chemical engineering and material science at UC Davis has recently won the Nanotech Briefes Magazine’s Nano 50 award for 2007 for this invention.

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