MENLO PARK, CA/COLLEGE STATION, TX – A much more reactive type of platinum and a, so far hypothetical, platinum-based composite material offer prospects of lowering costs for this essential, and expensive,  catalyst for fuel cells.

The first one, waggishly dubbed by some “platinum-on-steroids”, boosts this precious metal’s catalytic capabilities by a so-called dealloying process that researchers Anders Nilsson, Peter Strasser and Hirohito Ogasawara at the Energy Department’s Stanford University’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park and the University of Houston say would cut the amount of platinum required for the same catalytic effect by 80% - a five-fold increase in reactivity.

  The second one represents a class of composite materials, a platinum/iron-carbon/iridium system, found via computational chemistry by Prof. Perla Balbuena at Texas A&M’s Artie McFerrin Chemical Engineering Department in College Station. As a next step, Balbuena wants to now actually produce this material which exists only as a computational model so far, begin building the new ... Log in to view full article.