Hydrogen Fuel Cells Find Their Groove

Grooves in the kind of hydrogen fuel cells most likely to power vehicles may boost the performance of the devices by up to 50 percent, a new study finds.

A fuel cell converts the chemical energy stored in fuels such as hydrogen into electricity. It works by reacting the fuel with oxygen or another oxidizing agent that can strip electrons from the fuel. Fuel cells have two electrodes—an anode, where the fuel is oxidized, or loses electrons, and the cathode, where the oxidizing agent is reduced, or gains electrons.

Fuel cells that run off hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, hold great promise as clean, efficient sources of energy. When hydrogen reacts with oxygen in fuel cells to generate electricity, instead of yielding pollutants as fossil fuels do, the result is simply water.

“It’s not just the materials you put in the electrode that matter—it’s also how you structure the materials at the microscale.”
—Jacob Spendelow, Los Alamos National Laboratory

The best candidate fuel cells for powering automobiles are polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells, also called proton exchange membrane fuel cells, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. These use a proton-conducting polymer membrane as the electrolyte interposed between the fuel and oxidizer to help shuttle electric charge within the fuel cell.