FuelCellsWorks

Charles Freese, executive director of GM Fuel Cell Activities, hands off the keys for a long-term loan of a Chevy fuel cell vehicle to Los Angeles biologist Stephanie White on Tuesday in Burbank, Calif. White, a fuel cell advocate and participant in the Project Driveway demonstration fleet of Chevrolet Equinox Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles, will drive the vehicle for the next six months.

Testing Under Way on Production-Intent System for 2015 Commercialization

Burbank, Calif. – General Motors Co. is testing a production-intent hydrogen fuel cell system that can be packaged in the space of a traditional four-cylinder engine and be ready for commercial production in 2015.

Before and After

The system is half the size, 220 pounds lighter and uses about a third of the platinum of the system in the Chevrolet Equinox Fuel Cell electric vehicles used in Project Driveway, the world’s largest market test and demonstration fleet of fuel cell electric vehicles that began in late 2007 and has amassed nearly 1.3 million miles of everyday driving in cities around the world.

“Our learning from Project Driveway has been tremendous and these vehicles have been very important to our program,” Charles Freese, executive director of GM’s Global Fuel Cell Activities told reporters Tuesday at a news briefing on GM’s fuel cell progress.

“The 30 months we committed to the demonstration are winding down, but we will keep upgrades of these vehicles running and will continue learning from them while we focus efforts on the production-intent program for 2015.

”Some of the 119 fuel cell electric vehicles in Project Driveway will receive hardware and software upgrades and will become part of a technology demonstration program with the U.S. Department of Energy. Others will be driven by businesses and a few will be used to continue showing that, with proper fueling infrastructure, hydrogen fuel cells are a viable alternative to gasoline-powered vehicles.

“We will continue to use the Project Driveway fleet strategically to advance fuel cell technology, hydrogen infrastructure, and GM’s vehicle electrification goals,” Freese said.

The first long-term loan of the new-look Chevy fuel cell vehicle will be to Stephanie White, a fuel cell advocate who was among the first Project Driveway participants and regularly blogs on her vision for a hydrogen economy in which zero-pollution fuel cells are a mainstream source of transportation. Freese presented White with the keys to the car on Tuesday.“

Driving the Chevy fuel cell around LA has been an amazing experience,” White said. “People are always stopping me to ask questions about the vehicle and I tell them how powerful and eco-friendly it is.”

About General Motors: General Motors Company, one of the world’s largest automakers, traces its roots back to 1908. With its global headquarters in Detroit, GM employs 204,000 people in every major region of the world and does business in some 140 countries. GM and its strategic partners produce cars and trucks in 34 countries, and sell and service these vehicles through the following brands: Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, GM Daewoo, Holden, Opel, Vauxhall and Wuling.

Ceramic Fuel Cells Limited [AIM/ASX: CFU], a leading developer of high efficiency and low emission electricity generation units for homes and other buildings, has expanded its European operations, with the sale of a BlueGen power and heating unit to Swiss utility Cosvegas.

Cosvegas supplies natural gas to more than one hundred municipalities in Switzerland.

From mid 2010 Cosvegas will operate a BlueGen unit in Lausanne, Switzerland to evaluate the technology for further deployment in Switzerland.

The order from Cosvegas follows recent orders for BlueGen units from other major utilities in Germany and The Netherlands, including E.ON Ruhrgas, EWE, RheinEnergie, Alliander and Gasterra. Ceramic Fuel Cells has also made BlueGen sales to customers in Australia and Japan.  Ceramic Fuel Cells is also operating fully integrated power and heating products with leading energy companies E.ON UK in the United Kingdom and GdF Suez in France.

About the size of a dishwasher, each BlueGen unit can produce twice the electricity needed to power an average home, with the surplus electricity sold back to the grid.  BlueGen also produces heat, which makes enough hot water for an average home.  BlueGen units can generate electricity more efficiently than the current European power grid, significantly reducing a home’s carbon emissions and cutting energy bills.

Ceramic Fuel Cells has achieved electrical efficiency of 60 percent, far higher than any other technology in the rapidly expanding market for small scale power and heating generators.  When heat is recovered from the electricity production process, total efficiency is up to 85 percent – twice as efficient as the average among current European power stations.

By generating power close to where it is used, Ceramic Fuel Cells’ products can meet the future demand for electricity without the need for huge investments in electricity transmission and distribution infrastructure.

Spokane, Wash.– Fuel cell provider ReliOn’s E-200™ hydrogen fuel cell system has been named a finalist in the Green category in the CTIA Emerging Technology (E-Tech) Awards. CTIA’s fifth annual E-Tech Awards program recognizes products in 15 categories in the areas of mobile consumer electronics, luxury mobile, applications, enterprise, green solutions and network technology. International CTIA WIRELESS 2010® will take place March 23-25 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

More than 80 prominent media and industry analysts judged the 300-plus entries submitted for the E-Tech Awards program this year. Products and services were judged on innovation, functionality, technological importance, implementation and the overall “wow” factor. ”

E-Tech Awards winners will be announced at a ceremony hosted by Robert Mesirow, vice president and show director for CTIA and Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, on Wednesday, March 24 at 2:00 p.m. on the Exhibits Innovation Stage located in the Emerging Technology Zone on the International CTIA WIRELESS exhibit floor, North Hall.

CTIA is offering companies two additional opportunities to win an award. Web visitors may vote for the Best Online Pick at www.ctiashow.com/awards. International CTIA WIRELESS show attendees will also have the chance to vote via text message onsite for products in the E-Tech Awards display to win Best in Show.

The E-200™ fuel cell system is designed around ReliOn’s patented technology and provides highly reliable power for smaller scale power applications. The product is a compact complete fuel cell system housed in a 2U (3.5” tall) rack-mountable package. Like all of ReliOn’s fuel cell products, emissions are limited to warm air and a small amount of water and the E-200 is exempt from the most stringent air quality standards, such as those set by the California Air Resources Board. Designed to be an economical small scale backup power solution, the E-200 can affordably provide hundreds of hours of runtime between refuelings and many years of service for critical equipment. The product is commercially available.

About ReliOn:
ReliOn is a leader in the development and marketing of modular Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cell products. The company markets commercially available fuel cell products using its patented Modular Cartridge Technology®. ReliOn products are available domestically and internationally for commercial and industrial backup applications in the 50-Watt to 12-kilowatt range. ReliOn fuel cells are certified to multiple safety and performance standards. www.relion-inc.com .

A graphene-oxide framework (GOF), formed of layers of graphene connected by boron-carboxylic “pillars.” GOFs such as this one are just beginning to be explored as a potential storage medium for hydrogen and other gases.

Graphene—carbon formed into sheets a single atom thick—now appears to be a promising base material for capturing hydrogen, according to recent research* at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Pennsylvania. The findings suggest stacks of graphene layers could potentially store hydrogen safely for use in fuel cells and other applications.

Graphene has become something of a celebrity material in recent years due to its conductive, thermal and optical properties, which could make it useful in a range of sensors and semiconductor devices. The material does not store hydrogen well in its original form, according to a team of scientists studying it at the NIST Center for Neutron Research. But if oxidized graphene sheets are stacked atop one another like the decks of a multilevel parking lot, connected by molecules that both link the layers to one another and maintain space between them, the resulting graphene-oxide framework (GOF) can accumulate hydrogen in greater quantities.

Inspired to create GOFs by the metal-organic frameworks that are also under scrutiny for hydrogen storage, the team is just beginning to uncover the new structures’ properties. “No one else has ever made GOFs, to the best of our knowledge,” says NIST theorist Taner Yildirim. “What we have found so far, though, indicates GOFs can hold at least a hundred times more hydrogen molecules than ordinary graphene oxide does. The easy synthesis, low cost and non-toxicity of graphene make this material a promising candidate for gas storage applications.”

The GOFs can retain 1 percent of their weight in hydrogen at a temperature of 77 degrees Kelvin and ordinary atmospheric pressure—roughly comparable to the 1.2 percent that some well-studied metal-organic frameworks can hold, Yildirim says.

Another of the team’s potentially useful discoveries is the unusual relationship that GOFs exhibit between temperature and hydrogen absorption. In most storage materials, the lower the temperature, the more hydrogen uptake normally occurs. However, the team discovered that GOFs behave quite differently. Although a GOF can absorb hydrogen, it does not take in significant amounts at below 50 Kelvin (-223 degrees Celsius). Moreover, it does not release any hydrogen below this “blocking temperature”—suggesting that, with further research, GOFs might be used both to store hydrogen and to release it when it is needed, a fundamental requirement in fuel cell applications.

Some of the GOFs’ capabilities are due to the linking molecules themselves. The molecules the team used are all benzene-boronic acids that interact strongly with hydrogen in their own right. But by keeping several angstroms of space between the graphene layers—akin to the way pillars hold up a ceiling—they also increase the available surface area of each layer, giving it more spots for the hydrogen to latch on.

According to the team, GOFs will likely perform even better once the team explores their parameters in more detail. “We are going to try to optimize the performance of the GOFs and explore other linking molecules as well,” says Jacob Burress, also of NIST. “We want to explore the unusual temperature dependence of absorption kinetics, as well as whether they might be useful for capturing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and toxins like ammonia.”

The research is funded in part by the Department of Energy.

* J. Burress, J. Simmons, J. Ford and T.Yildirim. “Gas adsorption properties of graphene-oxide-frameworks and nanoporous benzene-boronic acid polymers.” To be presented at the March meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) in Portland, Ore., March 18, 2010. An abstract is available at http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR10/Event/122133

March 17 (Bloomberg) — General Motors Co. aims to commercialize autos fueled by hydrogen even as the largest U.S. carmaker prepares to begin selling the battery-powered Chevrolet Volt plug-in vehicle late this year.

While U.S. policy has shifted to favor developing cars that use lithium-ion packs, rather than hydrogen fuel-cell models, both are needed to cut oil reliance and greenhouse gases, Charles Freese, GM’s executive director of global powertrain engineering, said at a briefing in Burbank, California. He discussed GM’s new fuel-cell power system that’s smaller, lighter and cheaper than the one used in its hydrogen-powered Equinox wagon.

“We are not abandoning the fuel-cell technology,” Freese said yesterday. “Through the worst years in this company’s history we maintained the program and maintained the forward progress.”

GM’s ability to fund costly hydrogen research came into question when the former General Motors Corp. filed for bankruptcy last year. As part of its reorganization, the Detroit-based company has reduced expenses to help pay back billions of dollars in federal bailout funds.

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