Platinium nanocube improves the performance of fuel batteries

Two principal obstacles to the success of hydrogen powered cars are related on fuel cells. Just like batteries, fuel cells produce electric power by chemical reactions, but it has rejected by its has low efficience and its high productions costs. Many scientifics have tested with wide variety of metals and other materials without overcoming these problems.

Now, a team managed by Shouheng Sun, chemistry teacher from Brown, has solved a similar dilema that Rubik cube for to use platinium, it's a beautiful metal coveted by it capacity for stimulate a chemical reactions in the cells fuels. The team has demostrated giving the platinium a cube form improve considerably its efficiency in a phase of the running of fuel cells known as reactions of reduction oxygen. Sun results has been published online in the Angewandte Chemie magazine.

Platinum helps to reduce the power barrier (quantity of power needed to start a reaction) on oxydation phase of a fuel cell. Also it is useful on the other end of the fuel cell knowed as cathode. There, it is knowed that platinum helps in the reduction of oxygen, a process in which the electron are taken from hydrogen atoms and are united with oxygen atoms to create an electric charge. The reaction is important because it only produces water. This by-product (rather than carbon dyoxid that cause global warm) is one of the most important reasons that fuel cells are a tempting investigation field both car manufacturers and politicians.

Nevertheless scientists have found difficulties when they want to maximize the potential of platinum on reaction of reduction oxygen. The barriers turn mainly around the form and the surface of the area (geometry geography). What Sun have discovered is moulding the platinum on a cube form at nanoscale boost its catalysis, that is to say, boost the speed of the chemical reaction.

"For the first time we can control the morphology of the particle to make it similar like a cube", said Sun. "Before we had got a very limited control on this process". "Now we have shown it can be done in a form of coherent way".

During his experiments, Sun with the postgraduate student Chao Wang and other engineers of the Japanese company Hitachi Maxwell Ltd. had created cubical and polyhedrical forms of different sizes adding platinum acetylacetonate (Pt(acac)2) and quantities trace of iron pentacarbonyl (Fe(CO)5) on specific levels of temperature. The team watched the cubes were more efficient as catalysts dued to on a big part to its surface structure and its resistance to be absorbed by the sulfate on the fuel cell dissolving. Next step acording to Sun will be to construct a fuel cell with an electrolytic polymeric membrane and in it test the platinum nanocubes as a catalyst.