Below is the text version for the "Spotlight on Los Alamos National Laboratory" H2IQ Hour webinar held on November 25, 2024.
Kyle Hlavacek: Sorry about that, everyone. But hello, and welcome to this month's H2IQ Hour webinar. Today we have a pair of presentations from Los Alamos National Laboratory. First, we're going to hear from Tommy Rockward, who will provide us with some success stories related to workforce development initiatives with tribal colleges and universities.
And then after that, we're going to hear from Jacob Spendelow on the Lab Innovator program known as L’Innovator. My name is Kyle Hlavacek with the Department of Energy's Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office, supporting stakeholder engagement and other outreach activities. Please be aware this Webex webinar is being recorded and will be published online in our H2IQ webinar archives. If you experience technical issues today, please check your audio settings under the audio tab. If you continue experiencing issues, please send me a direct message. There will be a Q&A session at the end of the presentations and, attendees have the opportunity to submit questions in the Q&A feature box.
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We'll now go ahead and hold—hand it over to Tommy Rockward, staff scientist at Los Alamos, for today's first presentation. Tommy, it's all yours.
Tommy Rockward: Thanks Kyle. Can you guys see my slides?
Kyle Hlavacek: Yep, there you go.
Tommy Rockward: Is it in the correct mode as well?
Kyle Hlavacek: Yep, I only see the slide. You're good.
Tommy Rockward: Alright, well, good morning or good afternoon depending on your time zone. And welcome to the H2IQ webinar. My name is Tommy Rockward. I'm a staff scientist here at Los Alamos National Lab with the Materials Physics and Applications Group. I'm excited today to talk about a collaboration between Los Alamos and Navajo Tech University entitled, “A Pathway To Participation in Clean Energy Research.”
OK, sorry. So, today's contents will contain some background, our collaboration goals, some success stories, and other Native American initiatives. In the lower left corner, you'll see a picture of the beautiful Navajo Tech University campus and on the right side, me engaging some of the students. Navajo Tech is located in Crown Point, New Mexico, which is about 225 miles west of Los Alamos. Its enrollment is about 2,000 students.
So, our collaboration with Navajo Tech is to build a long-term relationship, and we want to establish this through developing core capabilities common—with common interests in mind. One of those core capabilities is electrochemistry. Our group has fundamentally sound subject matter experts who are world class experts in electrochemistry. This collaboration also entails year-round opportunities for both students and staff. So, in essence, we are trying to establish a relationship that allows synergy for additive manufacturing and hydrogen fuel cells. Why additive manufacturing and hydrogen fuel cells?
Well, if you've ever been to the campus of Navajo Tech University, you will see that they are fully engaged in the additive manufacturing research space, right? And with their professors and students showing interests in energy-related research, it only makes sense to try to incorporate their area of expertise and our area of expertise. So here we present on some promising interactions, success stories developed through working with Navajo Tech, and then we'll even touch upon some other Native American universities and colleges that we're working with.
Our goal is to develop mutually beneficial relationships. With Navajo Tech being in close proximity of Los Alamos it’s only fitting, right? And so, our approach to developing these mutual beneficial relationships is quite simple. We want to engage in various educational efforts and opportunities.
On campus research, co-advisement for advanced degrees, having guest lecturers, things of that nature. We also want to perform complementary research, and we've performed complementary research that allows us to have long-term opportunities with our students.
OK, so, tribal college engagements in—with hydrogen technologies. The long-term relationships that I just mentioned, and opportunities are based around the following. We set up common interests to perform synergistic research on campus where students get to perform research in a hybrid work environment because they have similar tools like we have at Los Alamos. These things afford the students to come directly to our site and able to just work in our labs with minimal—minimal engagement because they're already, they have similar backgrounds now.
So here we're looking at some collaborations that we have for clean hydrogen and hydrogen careers. Los Alamos itself has 17,000 employees. Last year in 2024, we hosted over 2,000 students. Why is that important? It's important because 35% of our workforce were once students.
If we focus that in on interns who performed STEM related research, that number goes up to 65%. So, this is why it's important for this engagement to continue. Here we have just a video of some of the things that we've been engaged in with Navajo Tech.
[Video playback begins]
Rod Borup: We're working on fuel cells at Los Alamos National Laboratory for transportation applications, primarily heavy-duty trucking applications, so that that gives us a way to decarbonize the transportation sector of the United States. We're providing the opportunity for the NTU students to work directly alongside our staff scientists, use the equipment that exists at Los Alamos, and help train them along the science and technology career paths.
Tommy Rockward: So, the lab has an existing collaboration with Navajo Tech through the Minority Serving Institute partnership program and an additional collaboration through the Hydrogen Fuel Technologies Office. The NNSA MSIPP program has been in the relationship with Navajo Tech for going on five to six years, whereas the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technologies Office have just afforded us an additional opportunity in the form of a fellowship to the scholars at NTU. Those fellowships will afford those students an opportunity to continue to work with us for long term in addition to following their passion in attending graduate school. So, this is an example of a hydrogen fuel cell, right? They operate off of hydrogen and oxygen, so our only products from this guy is clean energy and water. There are a couple of projects that stand out for the Navajo tech students that we're working on. Those projects are all component-based projects.
Jonathan Chinana: Here at Navajo Tech, there are seven of us that are currently working with Los Alamos and each of us plays a different part in the project. What I work on is called a potentiostat where you can program it to detect hydrogen leaks. And so that's what the main purpose of the device I am currently building, and so my next step after the fellowship is hoping to get into a post-baccalaureate program at Harvard.
Jasmine Charley: So, I'm trying to test what components could, or what elements could, cause maybe the materials in a fuel cell to rust, like the durability, how long it's going to last. Hopefully, if our research, our project's success—is successful, then fuel cells will last a lot longer. A good example of use of fuel cells is any automotive vehicles, I think they're putting in like airplanes.
Tommy Rockward: We've seen some great students that came from Navajo Tech, and we’d like to continue that relationship, not to mention the proximity of Navajo Tech with respect to Los Alamos. So that seems that we can actually train students in our backyard for our workforce.
[Video playback ends]
Tommy Rockward: Thank you, and here yet some other links to videos. I encourage you to watch the videos and hear first-hand from the students. Jonathan, whose background is in electrical engineering, who was working on the mini potentiostats. He was able to get into Harvard. He's at Harvard currently.
Jasmine, here's her timeline, and I think it's a success story in itself. So, you will see, a pattern here of our relationship with Navajo Tech and their students and that not only do we recruit and re—we also try to retain students for extended periods of time. Jasmine graduated initially in 2022. She started working with her first internship at 2023, at Los Alamos. She does some great work. She was able to present her work at a conference while still in school.
At Navajo Tech, she obtained yet another degree in mathematics, but more recently, Jasmine has been accepted into a PhD program in the biomedical engineering field. How is this relevant? Well, when she first started working with Los Alamos, she learned the fundamentals of electrochemistry, and now fast forward to her PhD program where she'll be using those fundamental properties of electrochemistry to look at bio—biological sensors.
Two other students who are also success stories are Nylana and Winter. Both Nylana and Winter have been conducting internships with Los Alamos. Nylana, from her own words, she's contributed to our Los Alamos National Lab work, but her area of expertise is additive manufacturing, so I'm learning a lot from Nylana. Winter has been working on direct energy deposition to look at the feasibility of multi-metal materials for bipolar plate applications. They both graduated from Navajo Tech and has been accepted into Purdue’s program from where they are now—they just actually started their master's program.
Deirdra is yet another scholar that we can boast as a success story. She started with Los Alamos in 2022. She's graduated. She's hopeful that she can also go to Purdue, but she is currently working in Los Alamos on a year-round bridge program. That bridge program will afford Deirdra the opportunity to apply to different universities or apply to the workforce. So that's essentially what the essence of the bridge program is.
And as students go through the pathway, other students come in. So, Justin Gamble is a newer intern. He just recently started, but he came to the table with some technical skills that we thought were very useful for our fuel cell program, i.e., since we are working with bipolar plates and their corrosion properties. Justin is well versed in using the ICP mass spec where he can look up trace contaminants. And so, his study is to quantitate ion leach rates from corrosive properties. You can clearly see that they do work when they're on campus, as there was an incident with the correct electrochemical corrosion cell, but that at least tells me that they are working.
Yet another thing as we look outside of just Navajo Tech and look at the other tribal colleges and universities that we're working with. One thing that we do at Los Alamos is we like to pair students to work on a common problem. So, there we use a multidisciplinary approach to solve problems. The slot die coater on the left is an instrument that we use to make electrodes for different electrochemical properties, whether it's fuel cells or electrolyzers. But we were using it to directly apply catalysts onto a gas diffusion media. The gas—if you look on the right side, you'll see some spheres, and then you start seeing as you transition the spheres start evaporating.
Well, the first sphere where you see the entire sphere, that means that the surface is hydrophobic and it's getting less hydrophobic, and this was because there was surface treatment that was applied to the gas diffusion layer. This was something very important for us. But the slot die coater itself only has one head, so meaning it can only apply catalysts to the surface and/or the surface treatment. So, what did we do? We have the students engage into an exercise with how to modify the slot die so that we can perform a surface treatment and then apply our catalysts. Low and behold, they provided two solutions. I'm happy to say that both solutions worked. And they're being incorporated and used here in our group.
So, there's a lot, there are a lot of outreach activities that we participate in as well. So, we use these outreach activities as a recruiting tool. On the left, LANL staff traveled to Macy, Nebraska, which is located right outside of Omaha, to the Nebraskan Indian Community College. There students and staff got to learn about exciting opportunities on our campus. They got to hear firsthand from LANL scientists. We also did a demonstration. So that's the staff going out to the campuses.
And then we also afford opportunities for colleges to come to our campus. On the right, that's just an agenda from our visitors from United Tribes Community College and Turtle Mountain Community College where they got to see around the lab and tour the lab.
And one more success story, from student to staff, Lyra Troy. She's from the University of Arizona. She worked with the fuel cell program for two-plus years. She's worked with some industry partners, she's worked with multiple divisions here at the lab, so she not only did she work with hydrogen fuel cells, but she worked with the fusion group. So, very talented young lady who is now staff and has just accepted to be an ambassador and mentor for our Native American initiatives.
So, I think that puts me at the end of my presentation, but before ending the presentation, I'd like to acknowledge the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office, the Underrepresented Minority Program from the LANL Director's Office, and the NNSA Minority Serving Institution Partnership Program. Thank you.
Kyle Hlavacek: Thanks, Tommy. I'll go ahead and now hand it over to Jacob Spendelow, who is also staff scientist at LANL.
Jacob Spendelow: OK. Yeah, let me go ahead and start sharing. OK, great. Hope you guys can see the slides OK?
Kyle Hlavacek: Yep, perfect.
Jacob Spendelow: OK, yeah. So, hi everyone, yeah, so I'm Jacob Spendelow from Los Alamos and I'm going to tell you about our new L’Innovator 2.0 program, which is a great opportunity for industry to collaborate with the labs. And in particular, L’Innovator 2.0 is focused on providing opportunities to partner with LANL on commercializing some of the technology that we've been developing with support from HFTO, including technology on novel fuel cell catalysts and novel electrode structures.
And you can see some examples here of new catalysts and electrodes that have been developed at Los Alamos in the last few years. I think there's a link just posted in the chat showing you where you can access the L’Innovator 2.0 call, and you can see here it's sort of the first page of that call.
So, the call has more information about the L’Innovator program, information about the specific technology that is included in this L’Innovator 2.0, as well as information about how to engage in this process and submit an LOI. Of course, if you can't find this link later on, it's pretty easy to find if you just Google L’Innovator, it'll probably be the first thing that pops up. So, I encourage all of you to look at the call and see if there's anything there that is interesting to your company.
But overall, so L’Innovator 2.0 is providing this opportunity to partner with LANL and access our catalysts and electrode IP via a very streamlined process. And it also provides access to support from LANL in further developing and demonstrating and commercializing this technology with co-funding from the HFTO office. And here we—at the bottom you can see a list of IP that is included in this L’Innovator 2.0, which includes a lot of IP related to electrode designs, as well as catalysts and catalyst supports.
And a lot of this IP was developed through the Million Mile Fuel Cell Truck consortium, or M2FCT, so I'll give just a quick overview of M2FCT here. So M2FCT is an HFTO-sponsored consortium, which has many partners throughout the country, but is sort of driven by five core labs as listed here. And M2FCT is trying to drive forward the development of fuel cells for heavy-duty trucks including all levels ranging from materials development, component integration, with a very strong focus on durability, and then going all the way up to the system analysis level.
And through the efforts of the M2FCT consortium we've been driving continuous progress, and you can see the improvement real—relative to our kilowatts per gram figure of merit, you can see the improvement over the last few years here. And much of this progress has been driven by the novel catalysts and electrode designs that have been developed by the consortium in particular at Los Alamos.
And so now moving on to talk about—in more detail about some of these specific technologies that have been developed at Los Alamos and that are part of this L’Innovator call. So, first I'll tell you about our work on novel catalysts and catalyst supports. And a lot of our catalyst support work in recent years has been focused on these carbonized MOF catalyst supports, so these are metal organic frameworks, including common MOFs such as ZIF-8. And these MOFs provide excellent precursors for catalyst supports that are very flexible and they can provide highly tunable catalyst supports after carbonization.
Another advantage of these MOF-based approaches is that they can use very low-cost precursors. In the case of ZIF-8, this zinc salt and 2-methylimidazole are both very cheap commodity chemicals, and it's quite facile to form the ZIF-8 structure. And then the carbonization process leads to formation of these sort of geometrically shaped carbon particles, which as you can see bear quite a bit of resemblance to the parent ZIF-8 material.
But so, this carbonized ZIF-8 has a lot of great properties as a catalyst support for fuel cell cathodes. It has this nice balance of microporosity and mesoporosity that develops during the carbonization, and so that can help with some of the mass transport functions. It also has a highly tunable particle size with a narrow particle size distribution as well as abundant heteroatom doping, which can improve the interaction between the catalyst nanoparticles and the support.
And so, you can see here some TEM images of platinum on the carbonized ZIF-8, or CZIF8 support. And so also, we have XRD here showing that the platinum particles deposited on the support are, are quite very small particles. And when we do MEA testing using these novel catalysts, we see excellent performance compared to the commercial baseline that we're using in M2FCT, which is platinum on high surface area carbon. But even more importantly, we see much improved durability compared to the commercial baseline, and as a result, after doing 90,000 AST cycles, we see performance that is more than twice as high as the performance of the baseline catalyst.
So, in addition to platinum on CZIF8 we've also been looking at platinum cobalt, and we've been developing intermetallic platinum cobalt technology, and there's also IP on that, which is part of this L’Innovator program. And we've moved through a few different generations of the intermetallic platinum cobalt catalysts on this CZIF8 support. You can see here our very first attempt, which had not—you know, not really complete ordering of the catalyst and we also had some pretty broad distribution of the particle size. But we've gone through quite a bit of improvement in our processes, which has led to much higher degrees of ordering and very narrow particle size distributions in this Gen2 material.
And then you can see here some more images, which came from our partners at Oak Ridge National Lab. You can see dark field STEM images as well as secondary electron images here, showing the way that these platinum cobalt particles are sitting on and in the support. So, the secondary electron images are showing essentially the surface of the support while the dark field images are penetrating through the support and showing everything that's inside.
And so, you can see that the vast majority of the particles—more than 90 % of the particles—are sitting inside the pores of the support. So, all these, all this platinum cobalt is sitting inside the support, where it's protected, it has better durability and it's not as vulnerable to poisoning by ionomer. And so, in the tomography images you can see that perhaps even more clearly where the red particles are the interior platinum cobalt, and then the teal are the exterior, and so again more than 90% of the particles are inside the support.
And then with similar tomography imaging after 90,000 AST cycles, you can see it's basically the same story where we still have the vast majority of particles are inside the support and you can see that there's very little change in the particle size for these internal particles because they are protected within the pores of the support. Whereas the platinum cobalt that's on the surface suffers quite a bit more Ostwald ripening and particle growth during the durability test.
And then we have some sort of zoomed out images here of an actual MEA and actual electrode made with this Generation 2 intermetallic platinum cobalt on the CZIF8 support. And so again you can see this very nice narrow distribution of particle sizes.
And another notable feature is that we don't have that much agglomeration of the support particles compared to some commercial support materials. And when we look at the EDS elemental mapping, we see this very nice distribution, comparing the carbon and the fluorine locations. We see that the fluorine, which shows where the ionomer is, is very nicely coating these support particles, providing very good pathway for proton transport, and we still have abundant porosity in the electrode providing the oxygen transport functionality.
So of course, we've done a lot of MEA testing on these catalysts, and you can see here some comparisons of both the Generation 1 and Generation 2 intermetallic catalysts on the CZIF8 support along with the M2FCT baseline commercial catalyst. And again, we're seeing significantly better performance at BOL, but what's more important is the great durability. And so, after doing the 90,000 AST cycles, we see again significantly higher performance, up to 150% higher performance, compared to the commercial baseline catalyst.
So, we've been working on taking these materials beyond the sort of tiny lab-scale batches and trying to scale up to getting to something that's more relevant for like industrial sampling, and so we've been able to make up to 10-gram batches. This is the platinum on the CZIF8 material, and you can see that we do have some differences between the large batch and the small batch. We've certainly lost a little bit of the shape of that support, but the particle size, the platinum particle size distribution looks quite similar. And so overall, we think that this scaled up material is reasonably similar to the small scale.
But we further verified that by doing MEA testing, and so you can see here a comparison of the small scale platinum on the CZIF8 along with the 10 g scaled up material with two different MEAs tested on two different test stations—actually in two different buildings at Los Alamos—and we were able to get pretty consistent performance, which is close to that of the small scale material. And so overall we think this is quite encouraging demonstrating the scalability of this technology.
OK, so moving on now beyond the catalysts to talk about some of our work on electrode designs. So, at Los Alamos in recent years, we've developed a number of different novel electrode designs, or electrode architectures, and we like to call these novel electrodes structured electrodes. And so again we have these three examples here, the array electrode, the grooved electrode, and the coaxial nanowire electrode, all examples of structured electrode technology developed at Los Alamos.
And so, these structured electrodes have three key attributes that define them. So, they're differentiated, so that means that in contrast to the conventional electrode where everything is sort of just mixed together, in these structured electrodes we actually segregate some of the different components so that different segments of the electrode have some components and other segments have other components, and in that way, we can actually optimize the different segments of the electrode for specific functions.
Another attribute of structured electrodes is that they're ordered, so instead of having the completely random structures that form in conventional electrodes, we’re now patterning and ordering the electrode structures, providing things like reduced tortuosity and improved percolation of these transport channels. And then lastly, they're hierarchical, so we're controlling the structural features across a range of length scales to optimize their transport and their durability.
So, the first example of a structured electrode that I'll talk about is the coaxial nanowire electrode, and this electrode looks quite a bit different from a conventional fuel cell electrode. So, we've completely gotten rid of the standard platinum and carbon catalyst here. We actually don't have any conventional catalyst support at all. So instead of instead of putting platinum on a support like carbon, what we're doing here is we're actually putting the platinum directly on the ionomer.
So, we have these ionomer—these vertically aligned ionomer nanowires and each nanowire is encapsulated in this continuous platinum film. And by doing that we provide this very non-tortuous pathway for excellent proton transport and then in between these nanowires, we have a lot of void space for oxygen transport, so we can get fast transport with this electrode design. And then another advantage is that by getting rid of the carbon support, we've eliminated one of the components that has durability problems in a conventional fuel cell electrode.
So here we have some SEM images showing the structure of this coaxial nanowire electrode. And then we also have some TEM and STEM images including cross section images. And we also have these again EDS maps, which are showing the elemental distribution. And so again you can see here that we actually have all of the ionomer contained inside these nanowires and then they're sort of encapsulated in the platinum shell in this coaxial configuration.
And then of course we've done MEA testing, and we've compared the performance and durability of this novel electrode design compared to a conventional design with a commercial platinum on carbon catalyst. And we've used both the catalyst AST and the support AST to evaluate the durability and seeing that we have negligible or almost zero degradation in this coaxial nanowire electrode compared to substantial degradation in the conventional catalyst, showing the great durability advantages of the coaxial nanowire electrode.
The next electrode structure I'll tell you about is the grooved electrode, and so you can see here an artist rendition of what the grooved electrode looks like. Where—so now we're back a little bit more to conventional materials, so we are using like a normal platinum on carbon catalyst here. But what we're doing differently is instead of just distributing it uniformly throughout the electrode, we're now sort of stacking it up in certain locations where it makes these well-defined ridges and then these ridges are separated by grooves, which are essentially just empty void space, and so we have fast oxygen transport through the void space on the grooves and then we have proton transport through these ridges. But because we're—because we've sort of decoupled the proton and the oxygen transport, we can now optimize each of these regions of the electrode for its specific function. So, because we're not relying as much on the normal parts of the electrode, the catalyst, for the oxygen transport, now we can actually put more ionomer into the electrode and have faster proton transport without paying any penalty in the oxygen transport rates.
And so you can see some more evidence to back up those statements here and some diagnostics we did where we measured the proton transport resistance of the both the flat and the grooved electrodes at different ionomer-to-carbon ratios and what we can see is that by increasing the ionomer-to-carbon ratio, we can greatly reduce the proton transport resistance, but at the same time we also measure the oxygen transport resistance and what we can see here is that for a flat electrode, when we increase the ionomer-to-carbon ratio we greatly increase the oxygen transport resistance. But by adding these grooves, which serve as highways for oxygen transport, into the electrode, we can now bring that oxygen transport resistance back down. And in particular for the case of an ionomer-to-carbon ratio of 1.2, the grooved electrode has essentially the same oxygen transport as the flat electrode at I/C ratio 0.9. And so, what that means is we're able to significantly increase the ionomer content in the electrode without paying any penalty in the oxygen transport, but we get a big bump up in the proton transport as a result of that higher ionomer content.
And then that carries over to improved polarization performance, so you can see here a comparison of MEA performance for grooved electrodes compared with conventional flat electrodes, and in particular we see the biggest enhancements under drier conditions, which I think is quite relevant for heavy-duty trucks in particular where it's expected that there will be a need for more operation at lower humidities.
And then finally moving on to the array electrodes. So, this approach is kind of similar to the grooved electrodes, but it's sort of the inverse because now instead of having empty grooves, which serve as oxygen transport channels, we now have these well-defined ionomer channels that serve as highways for proton transport. And because we're performing most of the proton transport through these ionomer channels, now we don't need as much proton transport in the catalyst so we can actually reduce the ionomer-to-carbon ratio and then we can get faster oxygen transport through the catalyst.
And so, you can see here some SEM images showing just the proton transport channels, the ionomer channels prior to adding the catalyst, and then you can see what it looks like after we add the catalyst and take a cross section of the electrode. And by creating this structure we can get improved proton and oxygen transport leading to substantially higher MEA performance.
And this is particularly interesting, I think, for heavy-duty vehicle applications because using these structured electrode approaches enables us to get better transport in the electrodes and that can overcome the specific challenge that we have in heavy-duty MEAs where we need to use higher amounts of catalyst compared to what people used to use for light-duty vehicles in order to have that improved durability. But as you stack up more and more catalysts in your electrode, you're creating that thicker and thicker electrode with more and more transport resistances. And so, by moving to some of these advanced electrode designs such as the array electrode, we can get faster transport through that electrode thickness, and that means that we can actually use higher catalyst loadings and get better durability without paying as much of a penalty in terms of the increased transport resistances.
And so, you can see that when you compare flat electrodes and array electrodes at different catalyst loadings. And so, in particular when we go from a loading of 0.3 all the way up to 0.5 for the flat electrode, we see a relatively modest increase in performance because we are paying those higher transport penalties. But for the grooved electrode, we see a substantially larger increase. And that's even more significant after the 90,000 AST cycles, so after doing durability testing, we can see a substantial improvement at the higher loading in the array electrode. And I also want to point out that the array electrode, even at just 0.3 mg/cm², is actually showing higher performance than the flat electrode at 0.5. So essentially, we've been able to get the equivalent performance of using a much higher loading while maintaining a relatively loading—relatively low loading of 0.3 mg/cm² in this case.
But so overall the array electrode is supplying significant enhancements in performance and those are even more relevant after durability testing due to the reduced degradation and enhanced durability of this advanced structured electrode.
And then lastly, my final technical slide here. I just wanted to highlight that we can actually combine the advanced catalyst designs along with the advanced electrode designs. So, this is an example here of putting our intermetallic platinum cobalt on CZIF8 catalyst into an array electrode, and you can see that we get even higher performance compared to the array electrode with the commercial catalyst and much higher performance compared to the flat electrode with the commercial catalyst. And again, an even bigger enhancement after the accelerated stress tests due to the enhanced durability both of the novel electrode structure as well as the novel catalyst.
So, I'll wrap up there and I'd like to acknowledge the great support from HFTO through the M2FCT consortium and in particular our technology managers Greg Kleen and Dimitrios Papageorgopoulos. Also acknowledge some support from LANL’s LDRD program as well as CINT where we did some of the micro fabrication. And so again, this technology that I've been showing you is available for commercialization in partnership with Los Alamos through this L’Innovator call. So, I really hope to have the opportunity to engage with some of you through this call. And again, by participating in this program, you'll have access to all these technologies I've shown, and you'll have access to a really amazing team of scientists at Los Alamos who will be working together with you to further drive these technologies to commercialization. So, I'll stop there and happy to take questions if there are any.
Kyle Hlavacek: Thanks, Jacob. We do have a couple of questions in the Q&A. If anybody else is sitting on the fence about asking a question, go ahead and drop that into the Q&A or to tell you what, even this time you can put it in the chat. OK, first question, for Jacob, what do you believe is the reasoning for the loss of definition of the catalyst support when scaling from 0.1 g to 10 g.
Jacob Spendelow: Yeah, I breezed through that pretty quickly. Let me go back and address that a little bit more. Yeah, I don't think I actually showed any of the details here. But when we moved from 0.1 g to 10 g, we actually changed a lot of things in how we synthesized the catalyst and the support. So, this small batch was made using methanol, which is, you know, somewhat toxic solvent and it was—it had a relatively low yield. For this 10 g batch, we actually developed a novel aqueous process for synthesizing the ZIF8 and it was much higher yield and, you know, used green chemistry. So, but what we observed is that we, the ZIF8 particles had similar crystallinity, but their geometric shape was a little bit different, you know, not as well defined. We don't think at this point that that matters that much. So, I mean this catalyst is quite beautiful with its shape, but we don't actually think it affects the performance that much. So, but it is something that we're going back and looking at more. We're continuing to tweak our aqueous chemistry and see if we can get, you know, features that are more similar to the small batch. I think actually a more relevant factor is probably the fact that the particle size was smaller for the 10 g batch, and that's just an issue of learning as we were doing this. And so now—now that we know that we produced a smaller particle, we’re actually going back and working on trying to tweak our aqueous chemistry to get particle size that's more similar to what we got from the old methanol-based process.
Kyle Hlavacek: Perfect, thank you. Let's see. Last question is, does CANE have any issues with the substrate needed to grow the wires and transfer to MEA, e.g., is the solid base template able to be removed?
Jacob Spendelow: Yeah. So, yeah, if you want you can check out our publication from last year on the CANE, which has a lot more information about how we do it. I would say that our current process is definitely a lab-scale process. So, we make these actually using what's called an anodized aluminum oxide template. So, we do ALD of platinum to coat the template walls, and then later we dissolve that template. So, I think, you know, there's definitely some manufacturing issues that would have to be worked through for that one. I would say that the CANE is probably the most lab scale of the electrodes that I've shown. In contrast, the grooved electrodes and the array electrodes are probably a little bit more scalable at this point since they don't require necessarily like a dissolvable template. But, you know, so, through this program with the HFTO funding, you know, if there's industry interest, we'll have the opportunity to do things like try to develop template-free processes to make—to make the, you know, the same sort of CANE structure.
Kyle Hlavacek: Sure. Thanks. We did have a couple added to the chat. How do PEM electrodes compare?
Jacob Spendelow: How do PEM electrodes compare?
Kyle Hlavacek: Yeah, that's what's in there. I'm not sure if Terese wants to elaborate on that a bit…
Jacob Spendelow: Yeah, I might need some clarification on that question. I mean these are electrodes for PEM fuel cells. So maybe we need some clarification on that question.
Kyle Hlavacek: OK. Is the scale up of a ZCIF8 more of a chemical batch process or more a material science approach to achieving particle shapes?
Jacob Spendelow: I guess I would describe it as more of a chemical process. So, you know, I'm a chemical engineer by training, so, you know, not only my whole field is about taking chemistry that was developed by chemists at a small scale and then scaling up to larger scales. So, you know, when we looked at scaling up our CZIF8 material, we looked at a number of ways that we wanted to change the process to make it more scalable.
So, as I mentioned earlier, we decided early on that we wanted a clean and green process. So, we moved to aqueous chemistry instead of the methanol approach. We also looked at different processing equipment. So, for instance, we were using freeze drying for our methanol-based approach, which is probably not a very scalable approach for drying the material, and so, you know, we moved away from freeze drying and we moved to rotary evaporation, which is a more scalable approach. So overall, I'd say it's probably more of kind of a traditional chemical engineering, how do you take something that a chemist developed at the milligram scale and develop and scale it up to grams and ultimately kilograms. Or even larger.
Kyle Hlavacek: Let's see. Next question, do you have an estimate of potential cost impact?
Jacob Spendelow: Well, I showed a bunch of technologies here so they all might have different cost impact, but what I would say is that overall, you know, if you look at the great cost analysis that's been done by the HFTO program through many years, particularly Brian James’ program at Strategic Analysis, what they've consistently shown is that materials costs really dominate the overall system costs for—and that's true, you know, when you're looking at catalysts, but I think also looking at the electrode design. And so overall processing costs are relatively low compared to the materials costs. So, for the—for the platinum on the CZIF8 catalyst I actually think they're the—the processing costs can be quite similar to conventional platinum on carbon, but we can get much better performance and durability. For the electrode designs, you know, definitely. You know, for sure the processing cost will be higher than a conventional electrode design. And so, then it's just a question of how much is the gain that you get in better performance and durability, how much is that worth to you?
And so, again, given the fact that the platinum cost in particular really dominates the cost of the electrode. So, you know, if we increase—if we marginally increase the electrode processing costs but if we can significantly reduce our platinum cost, you know, I think that's definitely a good trade off. And so of course every, you know, company will have to do their own analysis and figure out what is important to them. But you know, when I talk to industry, the message I've generally heard is that if we can substantially reduce the platinum requirement or if we can get better durability, that that probably will justify the marginally higher electrode processing costs.
Kyle Hlavacek: Thanks. Let's see. I have a couple more coming in now. Have you looked at low temp start up with any of these designs? Since this is an issue with some other nonconventional designs such as an STF.
Jacob Spendelow: Yeah, that's probably mostly an issue for the coaxial nanowire electrode. There's definitely some issues there that we have to work through. I would say that the array electrode and the grooved electrode actually do quite well in that respect because they—they're a little bit more, you know, conventional compared to the coaxial nanowire electrode. They're using conventional technology—conventional catalyst technologies, you know, conventional platinum on carbon. And so, we have done testing of the grooved electrode and the array electrode under a variety of different humidification conditions and we, what we can see is that they're quite robust to operation throughout a wide range of humidities. I think that's actually an advantage of these technologies compared to the conventional electrodes.
Kyle Hlavacek: How high has the pressure—sorry that just shifted—how high has the pressure differential across the electrode been explored?
Jacob Spendelow: So, I think they're talking about like the pressure differential between inlet and outlet maybe. So, our testing at this stage has primarily been differential cell testing where we have minimal pressure drop. As we scale up these electrodes, we're moving to larger active areas and looking and moving to integral cells where we'll have a larger pressure drop. You know, a priori, I don't have any reason to think that it'll be substantially different from a conventional electrode, but I’d say that remains to be studied.
Kyle Hlavacek: Thank you. What happens to the structure and performance of the ordered electrodes after hundreds of hours of compression in a fuel cell?
Jacob Spendelow: Yeah, well we have done hundreds of hours of compression and testing, and what we've seen is that we retain these structures. So, I don't think I have any images in this particular talk, but actually if you go to our Nature Energy paper from last year, we actually show SEM images of a cross section after extended testing in an MEA, you know including compression, and we are able to retain this groove and ridge structure.
I'd say probably this electrode is a little bit more vulnerable to collapse, but it, you know, it's still retained its structure. The array electrode is quite robust because it has, you know, essentially it doesn't have those empty grooves, every—all the space inside the array electrode is filled. So, we retain the, you know, sort of the macro scale structure of these well-defined ionomer channels surrounded by catalysts very well in the array electrode.
Kyle Hlavacek: Has a techno-economic analysis from SA been performed on any of these capabilities or planned for the L’Innovator program?
Jacob Spendelow: That's something that we can discuss with DOE, you know, that funding would have to come from them. We have talked with Brian James and told him about some of our processes and, you know, discussed things like scalability. I would say from my discussion with him, no like red flags came up, but he hasn't done his full TEA analysis on these.
Kyle Hlavacek: OK. What is the life cycle expectation? Will the platinum be recoverable for manufacturers into additional membranes?
Jacob Spendelow: So, you know, for the platinum on CZIF8 catalysts I'd say it's essentially the same as a conventional platinum on carbon. So, you know, any sort of recycling—recovery and recycling technique you're looking at for platinum on carbon should work just the same, I would believe, for the platinum on CZIF8 catalyst. It's just a different way of making, you know, a carbon support with better properties.
For the more advanced electrode designs, you know, that's something that I think should be studied. There's questions like, you know, for instance, for this array electrode, how easy would it be to remove the catalyst from the ionomer or, you know, from the membrane might be a little bit different compared to a flat electrode where, you know delamination will not probably occur as readily. But I, you know, I don't know that that's a showstopper in terms of removing the platinum from the MEA and recycling it.
Kyle Hlavacek: OK, do the structured surfaces introduce any failure modes due to durability concerns versus planar slash boring structures?
Jacob Spendelow: We haven't seen any indication of that so far. We've actually seen better durability if anything so I guess—I don't have the reference here, but we published another paper last winter, I think it was actually just earlier, maybe like in January, on cracked electrodes where we actually used the same approach that we used to make these grooved electrodes, but we tried to make them be a little bit more like conventional electrode cracks. But overall, you know, we just didn't see any penalty in terms of the durability.
There was a concern that these cracks in the, you know, grooves or cracks in the electrode could sort of propagate to the membrane. But what we've—you know, so we had that concern, but what all of our testing showed was that because these cracks are so small, I guess I don't have an actual scale bar here or a label here, but these cracks are on the order of about a micron wide. And so, they're so small that they just don't really result in significant stress on the membrane. The analogy I like to use is it's kind of like a bed of nails, it's like lying on a bed of nails. There's so many tiny, tiny little stress points that none of them are going to actually result in a, you know, a major stress that could cause a localized failure.
Kyle Hlavacek: Perfect. And then last question is, what is the greatest aerial surface area tested for any of these capabilities, any short stacks?
Jacob Spendelow: No, we've been, so we started with 5 cm² testing for all of them and we've moved to some initial work with some of our partners on 50 cm² testing. We haven't done anything like a short stack yet. But you know if there's interest that's something that can be done through the L’Innovator program.
Kyle Hlavacek: Great. Thanks Jacob.
Jacob Spendelow: Yeah, thanks so much for the opportunity.
Kyle Hlavacek: Yep, so that's going to conclude our H2IQ Hour for today. Once again, I'd like to thank Tommy and Jacob for today's presentations. The slides and the link to the recording of this webinar will be available within the coming weeks in the H2IQ Hour archives. Be sure to subscribe to HFTO news to stay up to date. From all of us at the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technologies Office, have a wonderful Thanksgiving and safe travels to your destination. Thank you for attending. We look forward to seeing you at our next H2IQ Hour. Thank you.
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