Ryan O’Hayre, professor of metallurgical and materials engineering at Colorado School of Mines, was recently featured in an article in Science about a new breakthrough in the development of a midrange-temperature fuel cell that can run “warm enough for reactions to proceed quickly, but cool enough to allow them to be built from cheaper metals.”
From the article:
O’Hayre says the new work is “a great contribution,” and calls the performance “impressive.” But he notes that there are still a few issues that need to be solved before these devices are ready for market. For starters, the current cells are small, just a few centimeters in diameter. Researchers would need to find a way to make much larger versions, which could be tricky. That’s because the dense coating on the anode was formed by a technique called pulsed laser deposition, which is difficult to do large-scale on a commercial assembly line.