According to an article published by Imperial College London, portable hydrogen fuel cells are highly sought after in the automotive industry as a greener alternative to electric batteries but are expensive to mass produce due to the reliance on platinum as a primary reaction catalyst.
 
“Currently, around 60% of the cost of a single fuel cell is the platinum for the catalyst,” said Anthony Kucernak, lead researcher on the project and professor of chemistry at Imperial College London. “To make fuel cells a real viable alternative to fossil-fuel-powered vehicles, for example, we need to bring that cost down.”
 
To solve this problem, the research team created a new catalyst design using single-atom iron. The single-atom iron was produced through an innovative synthetic process “where all the iron (is) dispersed as single atoms within an electrically conducting carbon matrix,” which increases the metal’s reactivity.  
 
According to the team’s findings, which were published in the April 2022 edition of Nature Catalysis,  the single-atom iron catalyst performed similarly to a traditional platinum catalyst in fuel cell laboratory tests.
 
“Our cheaper catalyst design should allow deployment of significantly more renewable energy systems that use hydrogen as fuel, ultimately reducing greenhouse gas emissions and putting the world on a path to net-zero emissions,” Kucernak said.
 
Read the full article here.