Hidrogênio

One of the biggest obstacles to widespread adoption of clean hydrogen fuel cell-powered cars and trucks is the high price and rarity of the platinum and platinum-family catalysts that the stacks need to make electricity. The costly metals are critical to carrying out the crucial oxygen-reduction reaction at the fuel-cell cathode, the place where the water "exhaust" forms when oxygen molecules from the air combine with protons filtering through the polymer membrane and electrons arriving via the external circuit.
The bimetallic catalysts of platinum and nickel feature hollow, high-activity, high-surface-area faces both inside and out, which makes them significantly more efficient and potentially far less expensive than today’s counterparts, according to the team’s recent paper in
By greatly reducing the amount of platinum needed for oxygen reduction and hydrogen evolution reactions, the new class of nanocatalysts could lead to the design of next-generation catalysts with greatly reduced cost but significantly enhanced activities tuned as needed, the researchers said.

Synthesis of the nanoframes can be readily scaled up to produce high-performance electrocatalysts at the gram-scale. Importantly, the method can be generalized toward the design of other multimetallic nanoframe systems.

Novel nanocatalysts for fuel cells - SAE International