Following article off of catalyst website - abc TV show - talks about how platinum catalyst for fuel cells can be deposited by plasma rather than chemical means for 5 fold reduction in price. Link leads to more discussion about hydrogen economy and video segment.
Narration: Three years ago, Catalyst reported on the arrival of hydrogen-powered buses in Perth. While they’ve proved their ability to shuffle passengers around just like any other bus, they’ve turned out to be expensive to run. |
And the reason is that the fuel cells that power them are very pricey to make. |
Cormack Corr: ANU One of the main issues is the expense and particular the platinum. What we’re trying to do here is to reduce this cost of producing the fuel cells . |
The reaction needs a catalyst - platinum. This is traditionally coated onto the electrodes using chemicals. But this process is crude and wasteful. |
Prof Rod Boswell: If you use a plasma, you can put down a very thin film and you can use the catalyst very, very effectively and this in fact is the part of the process that we have been addressing, quite successfully actually which is a, quite nice, so we’ve been able to reduce the amount of platinum used by a factor of five. |
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