As the world’s third biggest producer of television sets and digital set-top boxes, Vestel,Turkey’s leading producer of home electronics, has established a reputation for the cheap and efficient manufacture of existing technology. Now, however, the company has announced that it has invested US$10m to compete with major international players like GE and Philips in designing its own range of high-tech fuel cells which it hopes to bring to market within three years. Vestel claims its designs offer both enormous improvements in efficiency on traditional energy products, and will help to reduce carbon emissions. And as one of the two designs makes heavy use of boron, if successful, it could turn Turkey’s reserves of that mineral into a highly lucrative resource.

Unique designs

Nothing new in themselves, fuel cells have been around for decades, but have in recent years become the subject of intensive research owing to both high oil prices and to increasing concern over carbon emissions. While existing designs vary considerably, the basic principle remains the same. In short, a chemical containing hydrogen is “induced” to “give up” its hydrogen atoms. These are then forced through a micro-membrane which removes the hydrogen atom’s one electron, producing electricity, and combing the remaining proton with atmospheric oxygen, creating water.

In the larger of Vestel’s two fuel cells—a unit designed to power a house or small business premises—the hydrogen comes from natural gas. Forced at 650°C over a catalyst, which absorbs the carbon, the gas’s four hydrogen atoms are used to produce electricity and hot water. A unit no larger than a domestic central heating boiler capable of supplying both domestic requirements for electricity and hot water, with no carbon emissions. More importantly the pilot unit extracts energy from the gas at an efficiency rate of 58%, almost double the 30% efficiency offered by traditional boilers.

Field trials of the unit are due to commence next year with Vestel predicting that it could be on the market as soon as 2007, at a price of around US$1,500—little more than a traditional boiler and far cheaper than the US$5,000 currently being charged for similar fuel-cell units. The only additional expense is the replacement of the catalyst every 10-12 months. If successful the unit could revolutionise global power markets, by offering consumers the freedom to produce their own electricity and hot water as they require, reducing the role of national and regional power producers. This would be a particular bonus for Turkey, which is reckoned to need to invest nearly US$18bn in constructing new generating plant by 2020, just to keep up with anticipated growth in demand for electricity.

Vestel’s other fuel cell design is also revolutionary, both in the likely effect on global markets and in its choice of raw material. Similar in design to existing small fuel cells used to power low wattage electrical equipment, Vestel’s design is unique in that the hydrogen is supplied from sodium boron hydride, which Vestel claims it can produce as cheaply as US$30/tonne from Turkey’s abundant reserves of boron. Vestel says that the design is ideal for powering mobile phones and laptops, which could run continuously for up to two weeks before requiring recharging with a tiny capsules of the chemical “fuel”. So successful have been prototype trials that Vestel has been invited to demonstrate its designs to Intel, a major US chip manufacturer. The Turkish firm predicts that its first such fuel cells could be on the market by end-2006 costing a fraction of traditional batteries, and offering almost limitless cheap recharging.

Investment in developing such cutting edge power generation technology may seem like a diversion from Vestel’s highly successful business model of producing low-cost electronic goods, primarily for globally recognised brands, far better known than Vestel’s own, with at least 70% of production going for export. However company executives contend that low-cost, high-efficiency alternative products such as fuel cells are set to become highly prized consumer products, and can be marketed in much the same way as Vestel’s other products such as satellite receivers and plasma TVs. “The major challenge is not the technology itself, rather the logistics of delivering it to the market,” Omer Yungul, a Vestel executive told BME.

Boron again

Turkish officials are enthused at the prospect of boron becoming a critical ingredient in fuel cells. Turkey is thought to be home to as much as 1.8bn tonnes of boron, 65% of the world’s known reserves. The mineral is abundant over much of the country and found in large easily extractable deposits of boron oxide. In response to the growing interest in the mineral, Turkey in 2003 established the National Boron Research Institute which earlier this month opened a new laboratory at Istanbul’s Marmara University, in partnership with the Turkish Technical Research Council, with the aim of increasing the pace of research into possible uses for the little understood element.