FuelCellsWorks

LOUGHBOROUGH, United Kingdom & LONDON–Intelligent Energy, the leading clean power systems company, and the Suzuki Motor Corporation today jointly unveiled the Suzuki Burgman Fuel Cell Scooter in London’s Living Room, City Hall, London.

First presented at the 2009 Tokyo Motor Show, the city friendly Burgman Fuel Cell Scooter builds upon the success of the Crosscage fuel cell motorbike unveiled in 2007. The Fuel Cell Burgman takes the next step towards offering cleaner, more efficient motorcycles in a practical and accessible form with the potential to significantly reduce emissions around the world.

Chair of the London Hydrogen Partnership and London’s Deputy Mayor for policing, Kit Malthouse, who opened the event at London’s City Hall, said, “I am incredibly excited by the Burgman Fuel Cell Scooter. It’s a fantastic piece of kit which shows how we can combat climate change without all having to wear hairshirts. This scooter, which produces nothing but water, is a triumph of human ingenuity. I hope Londoners will dump their 20th century motorcycles and buy one built for the 21st century.”

The scooter is equipped with the latest version of Intelligent Energy’s unique and proprietary air-cooled, clean fuel cell power systems and is fuelled from a cylinder of hydrogen, which can be re-fuelled in a few minutes and gives a riding range of 350km comparable to a conventional Burgman scooter.

“The zero-emissions Fuel Cell Burgman scooter is the latest product of the successful commercial relationship between Suzuki and Intelligent Energy,” commented Dr. Henri Winand, CEO at Intelligent Energy. “Clean fuel cell engine powered motorcycles are designed for the real world and can be widely available to a large global market in the near future. Fuel cell vehicles in general have entered a period of fleet tests, and our two companies will soon be releasing details of the first public road testing and demonstration of the Burgman Fuel Cell Scooters, which will begin in the UK later this year.”

The first public road tests of the Suzuki Burgman will be conducted initially at Loughborough. These will be extended to controlled fleet tests in cities such as London, where zero emission vehicles such as a fuel cell scooter have the greatest initial potential.

About Intelligent Energy

Intelligent Energy is a clean power systems company, with a range of leading fuel cell and hydrogen generation technologies. The company is focused on the provision of cleaner power and low carbon technologies. Intelligent Energy partners with leading companies globally, in the transportation, oil and gas, aerospace, defence, distributed generation and portable power markets. Current partners and customers include Scottish & Southern Energy plc with whom the company has formed a joint venture to commercialise fuel cell combined heat and power (CHP) systems, and The Suzuki Motor Corporation. Intelligent Energy’s successes in recent years include the development of the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell motorbike and supplying the fuel cell system to Boeing which powered the world’s first manned fuel cell aircraft. The company also recently supplied Airbus with a multi-functional fuel cell auxiliary power unit (APU) aimed at on-board power and other loads in future commercial airliners.

www.intelligent-energy.com

About the Suzuki Motor Corporation:

The Suzuki Motor Corporation is one of the rare manufacturers in the world to produce both motorcycles and automobiles. The company designs and manufactures passenger cars, commercial vehicles, motorcycles, ATVs and outboard motors. Its motorcycle products range from scooters to large motorcycles to meet the diverse demands of its customers around the world. Suzuki’s automobile business has a large share of the Japanese mini car market and develops a range of unique products such as SUVs and mini-vans for the global market, focusing on the compact car market in response to increasing concerns for the good of the environment.

The company vigorously promotes technical cooperation through numerous joint ventures overseas and its main production facilities are located in 22 countries and regions around the world, enabling Suzuki to operate as a global organization serving 196 countries and regions.

www.suzuki.co.jp

The two major hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicle groups — the National Hydrogen Association (NHA) and the U.S. Fuel Cell Council (USFCC) — might decide to merge in 2010 as a result of both the recession and to make their congressional lobbying more robust and their educational outreach to states more widespread, especially in those states that have adopted California’s zero emission vehicle (ZEV) standards that hydrogen-powered cars can help meet, say advanced vehicle proponents.

This image illustrates that an applied electric field polarizes hydrogen molecules and the substrate, inducing hydrogen absorption with good thermodynamics and kinetics. Image courtesy of Qian Wang, Ph.D./VCU.

An international team of researchers has identified a new theoretical approach that may one day make the synthesis of hydrogen fuel storage materials less complicated and improve the thermodynamics and reversibility of the system.

Many researchers have their sights set on hydrogen as an alternative energy source to fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal that contain carbon, pollute the environment and contribute to global warming. Known to be the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen is considered an ideal energy carrier – not to mention that it’s clean, environmentally friendly and non-toxic. However, it has been difficult to find materials that can efficiently and safely store and release it with fast kinetics under ambient temperature and pressure.

The team of researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University ; Peking University in Beijing; and the Chinese Academy of Science in Shanghai; have developed a process using an electric field that can significantly improve how hydrogen fuel is stored and released.

“Although tremendous efforts have been devoted to experimental and theoretical research in the past years, the biggest challenge is that all the existing methods do not meet the Department of Energy targets for hydrogen storage materials. The breakthrough can only be achieved by exploring new mechanisms and new principles for materials design,” said Qiang Sun, Ph.D., research associate professor with the VCU team, who led the study.

“We have made such an attempt, and we have proposed a new principle for the design of hydrogen storage materials which involves materials with low-coordinated, non-metal anions that are highly polarizable in an applied electric field,” he said.

“Using an external electric field as another variable in our search for such a material will bring a hydrogen economy closer to reality. This is a paradigm shift in the approach to store hydrogen. Thus far, the efforts have been on how to modify the composition of the storage material. Here we show that an applied electric field can do the same thing as doped metal ions ,” said Puru Jena, Ph.D. , distinguished professor in the VCU Department of Physics.

“More importantly, it avoids many problems associated with doping metal ions such as clustering of metal atoms, poisoning of metal ions by other gases, and a complicated synthesis process. In addition, once the electric field is removed, hydrogen desorbs, making the process reversible with fast kinetics under ambient conditions,” he said.

The team found that an external electric field can be used to store hydrogen just as an internal field can store hydrogen due to charge polarization caused by a metal ion.

“This work will help researchers create an entirely new way to store hydrogen and find materials that are most suitable. The challenge now is to find materials that are easily polarizable under an applied electric field. This will reduce the strength of the electric field needed for efficient hydrogen storage,” said Jena.

The research is published online in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and will be highlighted in the front section of the print edition, “In this Issue.”

The research is based on a 1992 published polarization theory by Jena, the late B.K. Rao, a former professor of physics at VCU, and their student, J.Niu.

This work is supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Foundation of National Laboratory for Infrared Physics, the National Grand Fundamental Research 973 Program of China, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.