Tungsten in new technology14 Sep 2017 21:51
Hydrogen-powered fuel cells are a green alternative to internal combustion engines because they produce power through electrochemical reactions, leaving no pollution behind.
Materials called catalysts spur these electrochemical reactions. Platinum is the most common catalyst in the type of fuel cells used in vehicles.
However, platinum is expensive—as anyone who's shopped for jewelry knows. The metal costs around $30,000 per kilogram.
Instead, the UD team made a catalyst of tungsten carbide, which goes for around $150 per kilogram. They produced tungsten carbide nanoparticles in a novel way, much smaller and more scalable than previous methods.
"The material is typically made at very high temperatures, about 1,500 Celsius, and at these temperatures, it grows big and has little surface area for chemistry to take place on," said Dionisios Vlachos, director of UD's Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation.. "Our approach is one of the first to make nanoscale material of high surface area that can be commercially relevant for catalysis."
The researchers made tungsten carbide nanoparticles using a series of steps including hydrothermal treatment, separation, reduction, carburization and more.
"We can isolate the individual tungsten carbide nanoparticles during the process and make a very uniform distribution of particle size," said Weiqing Zheng, a research associate at the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation.