The fact that platinum degrades after a few cycles of use in the highly corrosive PEMFC environment is another major barrier.
“So the hunt is on for an electrocatalyst that is low-cost, more resistant to degradation and thus stable over longer periods of time, while also delivering impressive current density—in other words, the amount of electrical current per unit of volume,” Siyuan Zhu, one of the authors of the paper, said in a media statement. “And so enabling us to keep the promise of the compactness of PEMFCs.”
REEs to the rescue
The main option that has been under consideration for cost reduction is ‘diluting’ the amount of platinum needed by alloying it with other, cheaper metals that can assist or even enhance Pl’s catalytic properties.
The top candidates have so far been the so-called late and mid-transition metals such as iron, manganese, chromium,…
Platinum-lanthanum alloy may give push to next-gen fuel cells
