Smoltek Hydrogen Revolutionizes PEM Electrolyzers with Breakthrough Electrode Technology

By reducing iridium usage through advanced nanofiber and ALD coating innovations, Smoltek Hydrogen and SparkNano pave the way for cost-effective, large-scale green hydrogen production.

 

Smoltek Nanotech Holding AB (publ) ("Smoltek" or the "company") announces that the group company Smoltek Hydrogen, together with the Dutch ALD coating company SparkNano, publishes a white paper and holds a joint webinar on the synergies that the two companies' technology creates. By covering Smoltek's carbon nanofibers with an extremely thin and conformal coating of precious metals, the consumption of iridium in an electrolyzer cell can be reduced by 95 percent. Fabian Wenger, Head of R&D at Smoltek Hydrogen, will participate in a joint webinar on September 25 to discuss the collaboration, the technology and its potential for large-scale green hydrogen production.

 

Smoltek Hydrogen's unique innovation – a porous transport electrode designed for the anode in PEM electrolyzers – solves one of the biggest technical challenges in the green hydrogen industry: the high cost and limited availability of iridium, used as catalysts in PEM electrolysis. With SparkNano's advanced ALD coating technology, for platinum and iridium, a dramatic reduction of precious metals is enabled while maintaining performance and stability.

 

“With our carbon nanofibers and their ALD coating technology, we can together lower costs and reduce the use of rare precious metals and make green hydrogen available on a large scale”, says Fabian Wenger, Head of R&D at Smoltek Hydrogen.

 

Revolutionizing reduction of iridium usage 

 

With the ALD (Atomic Layer Deposition) coating technology, platinum is spread extremely evenly over Smoltek's carbon nanofibers, which provides conformal corrosion protection and protects the carbon nanofibers, which are then coated with an ultra-thin layer of iridium.

 

This enables the consumption of iridium to be reduced by up to 40 times compared to conventional coating methods. The combination of Smoltek's nanofibers and SparkNano's ALD technology also enables more efficient electron transfer pathways, increasing the overall catalytic activity of the electrolyzer cell. The ALD technology also improves the stability of the catalyst, which is a big step forward for the sustainability of green hydrogen technology.

 

A solution for large-scale production of green hydrogen 

Smoltek Hydrogen's innovative nanomaterials have been shown in long-term studies to work very well in PEM electrolyzers. Fraunhofer ISE, a leading German research institute, identified in October 2021 that iridium coatings below 0.4 mg/cm² are a must for large-scale production of PEM electrolyzers. This technology can thus pave the way for a faster expansion of green hydrogen production, which is crucial for the transition to fossil-free industrial processes.

 

“SparkNano is a Dutch company, partly owned by the French gas company Air Liquide. SparkNano's spatial ALD technology enables precise coatings of super-thin material films at higher speeds than older ALD technologies, which is a big advantage now that we start scaling up to larger volumes”, says Ellinor Ehrnberg, CEO of Smoltek Hydrogen

 

Source: FCW Team