BEIJING, April 25 (Xinhua) -- Britain's Imperial College London has developed a hydrogen fuel cell that uses a catalyst made of iron rather than rare and expensive platinum, reducing the cost of hydrogen fuel cells. The technology makes the widespread deployment of hydrogen fuel possible and will eventually reduce greenhouse gas emissions and put the world on a path to net zero emissions.

Hydrogen fuel cells convert hydrogen into electricity, with the only byproduct being water vapor, making them an attractive green alternative energy source, especially for the automotive industry. However, their widespread use is somewhat hampered by the cost of one of their main components. To facilitate the reactions that generate electricity, fuel cells rely on catalysts made from platinum, which are both expensive and scarce.

Currently, about 60 percent of the cost of a single fuel cell comes from the platinum catalyst," said Professor Anthony Kucenak, a lead researcher from the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College. To make fuel cells a truly viable alternative to fossil fuels, we need to reduce costs."

Now a European team led by researchers at Imperial College London has created a catalyst that uses only iron, carbon and nitrogen, an inexpensive and readily available material, and shown that it can be used to run fuel cells at high power. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Catalysis on 25.

In this new catalyst, all of the iron is dispersed as single atoms in a conductive carbon matrix. All of the atoms in it are clustered together, making it more reactive. These properties mean that iron promotes the reactions needed for fuel cells and is a good alternative to platinum. In laboratory tests, the team showed that the performance of single-atom iron catalysts approached that of platinum-based catalysts in a real fuel cell system.

In addition, the method developed by the team could be applied to applications other than fuel cells, such as chemical reactions that use atmospheric oxygen rather than expensive chemical oxidants as reactants, and wastewater treatment that uses air to remove harmful pollutants.

First author Dr. Asad Mahmoud of the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College said, "We have developed a new approach to making a range of 'single-atom' catalysts, which opens up opportunities for a range of new chemical and electrochemical processes. Specifically, we have used a synthetic method called 'metal transfer' that avoids the formation of iron clusters during the synthesis process. This process may be useful to other scientists who wish to prepare similar catalysts."

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