New Catalyst Paves the Path for Ethanol-Powered Fuel Cells

A team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Delaware and Yeshiva University, has developed a new catalyst that could make ethanol-powered fuel cells feasible. The highly efficient catalyst performs two crucial, and previously unreachable steps needed to oxidize ethanol and produce clean energy in fuel cell reactions. Their results are published online in the Jan. 25, edition of Nature Materials.

Like batteries that never die, hydrogen fuel cells convert hydrogen and oxygen into water and, as part of the process, produce electricity. However, efficient production, storage, and transport of hydrogen for fuel cell use is not easily achieved. As an alternative, researchers are studying the incorporation of hydrogen-rich compounds, for example, the use of liquid ethanol in a system called a direct ethanol fuel cell.

"Ethanol is one of the most ideal reactants for fuel cells," says Brookhaven chemist Radoslav Adzic. "It's easy to produce, renewable, nontoxic, relatively easy to transport, and it has a high energy density. In addition, with some alterations, we could reuse the infrastructure that's currently in place to store and distribute gasoline."

A major hurdle to the commercial use of direct ethanol fuel cells is the molecule's slow, inefficient oxidation, which breaks the compound into hydrogen ions and electrons that are needed to generate electricity. Specifically, scientists have been unable to find a catalyst capable of breaking the bonds between ethanol's carbon atoms.

But at Brookhaven, scientists have found a winner. Made of platinum and rhodium atoms on carbon-supported tin dioxide nanoparticles, the research team's electrocatalyst is capable of breaking carbon bonds at room temperature and efficiently oxidizing ethanol into carbon dioxide as the main reaction product. Other catalysts, by comparison, produce acetalhyde and acetic acid as the main products, which make them unsuitable for power generation.

"The ability to split the carbon-carbon bond and generate CO2 at room temperature is a completely new feature of catalysis," Adzic says. "There are no other catalysts that can achieve this at practical potentials."

Structural and electronic properties of the electrocatalyst were determined using powerful x-ray absorption techniques at Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source, combined with data from transmission electron microscopy analyses at Brookhaven's Center for Functional Nanomaterials. Based on these studies and calculations, the researchers predict that the high activity of their ternary catalyst results from the synergy between all three constituents -- platinum, rhodium, and tin dioxide -- knowledge that could be applied to other alternative
energy applications.

"These findings can open new possibilities of research not only for electrocatlysts and fuel cells but also for many other catalytic processes," Adzic says.

Next, the researchers say they will test the new catalyst in a real fuel cell in order to observe its unique characteristics first hand.

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Volkswagen Shows Off Advanced Fuels Vehicles

Volkswagen of America is showing off advanced fuels models of some VW cars at the Designing Sustainable Mobility Summit, being held at Art Center College of Design in Southern California.

Summit attendees and Art Center students are being provided the experience of driving VW models running on biodiesel, ultra low sulfur diesel, hydrogen, and highly efficient gasoline engines on public roads.

"It's important to demonstrate that raising the bar in such important areas as fuel efficiency and emissions reduction isn't just accomplished with exotic or future-oriented technologies," says Ron Cogan, editor and publisher of the Green Car Journal, which is hosting the summit's ride-and-drive. "Volkswagen's demonstration of its clean diesel and twincharger engines provides real-world examples of environmentally positive technologies that are operating on highways today."

At the event's Green Cars/Pasadena ride-and-drive, VW is fielding a Touareg V-10 TDI running on B5 biodiesel, a mixture of conventional ultralow sulfur diesel (ULSD) fuel and renewable biodiesel. Diesel fuel that includes a mix of biodiesel burns cleaner and also helps displace fossil fuel use, contributing to energy diversity. VW has extended warranty protection to its models operating on B5 biodiesel as a way to encourage use of this cleaner fuel.

An advance look is also being offered of a highly efficient, twincharger gasoline engine Jetta in development. This Jetta's TSI engine provides higher power output from a smaller displacement engine while also achieving greater fuel efficiency and lower emissions. The TSI is popular in Europe and now is being considered for use in the U.S. It uses asupercharger to provide engine boost at lower rpms and an exhaust-driven turbocharger at mid-range rpms and higher.

At the summit, VW's Touran HyMotion hydrogen fuel cell vehicle not only shows Volkswagen's interest in this zero-emission fuel, but also showcases the company's breakthrough high-temperature fuel cell.

A decade of VW hydrogen vehicle development has led to a high-temperature fuel cell that provides a more compact, lighter, and more durable fuel cell system. This technology holds great promise to make fuel cell powertrains more economical, key to future mass production, the automaker says.


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Sandia, Boeing Collaborate on Hydrogen Aircraft Project

Sandia National Laboratories and the Boeing Corporation will collaborate on a project to investigate hydrogen aircraft technology, specifically a hydrogen-powered fuel cell for providing emergency power to aircraft.

Fuel cells are touted as emission-free and more friendly to the environment and a popular way to deal with climate change if they burn hydrogen but hydrogen must be extracted from water trough electrolysis.

The work will be conducted under an existing umbrella Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) signed in 2002.

Boeing is the largest aerospace company in the world and the United States’ leading exporter. It is NASA’s largest contractor and the largest manufacturer of commercial jetliners and military aircraft. Boeing is also home to the Boeing Phantom Works advanced R&D unit.

Sandia is a major Department of Energy lab. Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.


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Hydrogen-Powered Lawnmowers?

In a breakthrough that could make fuel cells practical for such small machines as lawnmowers and chainsaws, researchers have developed a new mechanism to efficiently control hydrogen fuel cell power.


Many standard fuel cell designs use electronics to control power output, but such designs require complex systems to manage humidity and fuel recovery and recycling systems to achieve acceptable efficiency.


The new process controls the hydrogen feed to match the required power output, just as one controls the feed of gasoline into an internal combustion engine. The system functions as a closed system that uses the waste water to regulate the size of the reaction chamber, the site where the gasses combine to form water, heat and electricity.


National Science Foundation (NSF) awardee Jay Benziger of Princeton University developed the new technique with his student Claire Woo, a recipient of an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates award and now a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Woo and Benziger published their findings in the February Chemical Engineering Science, now available online.


The researchers believe the first applications for their technology will be in smaller engines. Fuel cells are currently inefficient on such scales due to the need for fuel recycling and excess hydrogen in standard designs. The researchers' new design is closed, so 100 percent of the fuel is used and there is no need for a costly fuel recycling system.


"The system is ideal for small internal combustion engines that lack emissions controls and are highly polluting," says Benziger. "There is also no need for an extensive hydrogen distribution system for these small motors; the hydrogen could be supplied in returnable tanks such as the propane tanks used for gas grills."


Benziger's next goal is to connect several of the new fuel cells together to increase power, a system that could potentially compete with cells now being tested in the automotive industry.





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A New Target for the Treatment of Breast Cancer

The active ingredient in a drug currently being tested to treat rheumatoid arthritis might also one day serve as an effective means of treating one of the deadliest forms of breast cancer.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have demonstrated that inhibiting the activity of the protease enzyme known as TACE can deprive tumor cells of a key factor needed for their proliferation. TACE is strongly present in a form of breast cancer which responds poorly to current therapies

“We have shown that inhibition of the TACE protease in breast cancer cells blocks the shedding of two critical growth factor proteins and results in an inhibition of a key signaling pathway that controls cell division,” says Paraic Kenny, a post-doctoral cell biologist with the research group of Mina Bissell in Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. “Based on analysis of cells grown in three-dimensional cultures, the inhibition of this protease results in the reversion of the malignant phenotype of these breast cancer cells and switches their behavior back to a phenotype very reminiscent of non-malignant breast epithelial cells.”

Kenny is the co-author along with Bissell of a paper published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation titled: "Targeting TACE-Dependent EGFR-ligand Shedding in Breast Cancer." This paper presents the latest experimental results from an on-going investigation led by Bissell into the ecology of tumors.

It has long been Bissell’s contention that “no tumor is an island.” Tumor cells, she maintains, exist in the same microenvironment as healthy cells and must therefore appropriate normal physiological processes to facilitate their growth and spread. As she and her colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated, this idea can open up potential new avenues and targets for diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

For this latest paper, Kenny and Bissell looked into the pathway by which the EGFR signal is carried. EGFR, which stands for Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor, is the protein on the outer surface of a cell that is activated by EGF and related growth factors and signals for the cell to divide. Given that one of the hallmarks of cancer is cell division run amok, the reduction of high levels of EGFR activity has long been a primary target for anti-cancer drug development. So far, however, drugs aimed at directly inhibiting EGFR activity have met with only limited success in the cancer clinic, primarily in a small number of lung cancers.

“Because of this, we turned our attention to the processes that regulate the production of the ligands which bind and activate EGFR,” Kenny says. “We reasoned that this binding and activation is essential for EGFR activation and that finding a way to block this interaction might prove to be an important additional approach to explore for inhibition of this pathway.”

Kenny stresses that the importance of EGFR to so many different tumor types, including lung, head and neck, bladder, colorectal and kidney, makes it likely that “TACE inhibition has the potential to be an effective means of stopping tumor growth for EGFR-dependent cancers outside the breast as well.”

<---We all know someone or are some one who has or have had cancer. The most common for women is breast cancer. Slow progress is made in the battle. A new vaccine prevents a virus that causes cervical cancer. Still cancer has no vaccine, nor cure. Scary too is the rise in cases of prostate cancer in men 18-37.--->

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Automaker Produces 1st Fuel Cell Firefighter Vehicle

DaimlerChrysler has introduced what the automaker calls the first fuel cell-powered fire response vehicle. The Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District will operate the Mercedes-Benz F-Cell as a supervisor's vehicle in the Sacramento, Calif., area.

Fuel cells release energy from the reaction of hydrogen with a catalyst and oxygen. This clean technology operates at a high level of efficiency and is true zero-emissions. Hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles emit only pure water vapor as exhaust. The U.S. federal government is pursuing research to replace gasoline-powered cars with fuel cell vehicles and create a "hydrogen economy."

Outfitted with decals, lights, sirens and a coat of bright red paint, the Fire Service Mercedes-Benz F-Cell is a look into the future use of fuel cell vehicles. The demanding operation of the vehicle will produce valuable data to help develop fuel cell technology, DaimlerChrysler says. The new fire response F-Cell joins the first fuel cell powered police car, also built by DaimlerChrysler, which operates in Michigan with the Wayne State University Police Department. These two vehicles are the first hydrogen fuel cell powered emergency response vehicles in the world, the automaker says.

"This program exhibits how DaimlerChrysler is taking on the challenge for industries and governments to create viable alternative-fuel solutions," says Mark Chernoby, vice president - advance vehicle engineering, Chrysler Group. "We're pleased to be a driving force in this team effort to develop zero-emissions transportation."

The Fire Service Mercedes-Benz F-Cell will be refueled at a BP Energy hydrogen refueling station located at the California Fuel Cell Partnership. Delivering hydrogen fuel cell vehicle experience to the fire service, the F-Cell contributes to the development of appropriate solutions for hydrogen transportation safety.

DaimlerChrysler says it has spent more than $1 billion in fuel cell vehicle research and development. No other manufacturer has accumulated more data or driven more zero-emissions miles -- almost 2 million, the company adds.

The DaimlerChrysler fuel cell vehicle fleet is diverse -- in addition to several research vehicles, it also includes medium-duty fuel cell Dodge Sprinter vans and more than 35 Mercedes-Benz Citaro fuel cell buses, which operate in Europe, the United States, Japan, Australia and Singapore. As part of the world's largest fleet of fuel cell vehicles, DaimlerChrysler has 32 fuel cell vehicles in customer hands within the United States and more than 100 around the world.

The Mercedes-Benz F-Cell is a reflection of DaimlerChrysler's leadership in fuel cell technology, the company boasts. The entire fuel cell system is housed in the floor of the vehicle, leaving full use of the passenger and cargo spaces. It has a range of approximately 100 miles and a top speed of 85 mph. The electric motor develops 88 hp (65 kW), enabling acceleration from 0 to 60 mph in 16 seconds. The fuel cell stack has been developed by theDaimlerChrysler cooperation partner, Ballard Power Systems.


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