FuelCellsWorks

Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust is looking to install fuel cell technology to improve its energy consumption.

Ambulances used by the trust may be fitted with methanol fuel cells, which will allow medical equipment to be charged even when the vehicle’s engine isn’t running, Business Green reports.

Alexis Keech, environmental and sustainability manager for the trust, told the news provider for every time the engines are not placed on “tick over” for an hour, a gallon of fuel could be saved.

“We have rapid-response vehicles situated in strategic places around the region at certain times, which help us respond to Category A or life-threatening incidents within eight minutes,” she added.

Yorkshire Ambulance Service covers an area of almost 6,000 square miles and operates more than 500 emergency response vehicles.

If the trial proves to be successful, then work could begin after June to equip all ambulances owned by the trust with the technology.

The project is taking place in conjunction with Antares, which provides electrical packages for specialist vehicles.  

Ultra agrees to acquire Adaptive Materials for $23m

Ultra announces that it has acquired Adaptive Materials Inc. from its founders, Dr Aaron and Michelle Crumm for an initial cash consideration of $23.0m. A further sum of up to $5.0m will be payable if certain performance-based measures are achieved by 31 December 2013.

Adaptive Materials designs and manufactures portable power solutions in the 50W – 300W range.  Adaptive Materials has developed Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFCs) that run on propane and provide more power in less space than competing technologies. Propane is an inexpensive fuel source which is readily available globally, and can be easily sourced in all current operational areas. Propane fuel cells deliver nine times the energy density of conventional batteries. Its products are suitable for niche applications where the power requirements are too small for conventional generators and too large for batteries.

Applications in the defence market for the fuel cell technology developed by Adaptive Materials include:

- individual soldiers; to power the increasing range of soldier-borne electronic equipment

- Unmanned Air Vehicles and Unmanned Ground Vehicles; to increase endurance compared to batteries and provide near silent operation compared to internal combustion engines

- remote sensors; to enhance the life of unattended sensor systems

Customer confidence in the technology developed by Adaptive Materials has been demonstrated by the award in recent years of over $45m of engineering funding from the US DoD and other research agencies. Adaptive Materials has a significant IP portfolio and is now preparing to enter volume production. It employs around 50 staff, including 15 engineers, operating from a facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

The acquisition of Adaptive Materials will be financed using Ultra’s existing facilities and is expected to be earnings enhancing in 2011.  Adaptive Materials will continue to operate from its existing facilities as a bolt-on acquisition, reporting to Phil Evans, Managing Director of Ultra’s Aircraft & Vehicle Systems division.

Rakesh Sharma, Chief Operating Officer of Ultra, commented:

“Adaptive Materials is an excellent acquisition for Ultra, adding to the Group’s range of specialist capabilities in the growing market for innovative energy solutions. Adaptive Materials has excellent IP, endorsed by its customers, and will benefit from Ultra’s proven abilities in high quality, volume manufacture as it enters the production phase for its range of fuel cell solutions. I am confident that Adaptive Materials will continue its track record of innovation under Ultra’s ownership.”

Company Closed Over 400 Unit Sales During Fourth Quarter

LATHAM, N.Y. — Plug Power Inc. (Nasdaq:PLUG), a leader in providing clean, reliable energy solutions, is using tremendous momentum from its 2010 success to welcome in the new year. During the year ending December 31, 2010, Plug Power sold over 500 of its GenDrive fuel cell units and manufactured and shipped over 650 units.

In the fourth quarter alone, the Company closed deals equating to over 400 GenDrive units. Some first-time customers include CVS, Coca-Cola and Winco Foods. At the same time, Plug Power received follow-on orders from repeat customers like BMW, Central Grocers and Walmart Canada. Concluding the successful quarter, Plug Power received letters of commitment from customers for another 250-plus GenDrive power units.

Plug Power manufactured and shipped a record number of units for the full year ending December 31, 2010, meeting its milestone of at least 650 unit shipments for the year. During the fourth quarter alone, over 280 units were distributed to customers across North America. These GenDrive customers include Central Grocers, Walmart Canada, Kimberly Clark and Coca-Cola. The Company’s Latham, NY manufacturing facility is capable of producing over 10,000 units each year.

“I’m pleased with the continued commercial adoption of our GenDrive solution by new customers and the follow-on orders by existing customers,” said Andy Marsh, CEO of Plug Power. “This positive traction is a direct line to significant market transformation within the material handling space.”

All of the deals closed in 2010 were without previously required major government subsidies from the Departments of Energy and/or Defense. This is evidence that customers are realizing the value of alternative energy solutions for their material handling businesses today.

Plug Power will discuss overall financial metrics during its regularly scheduled 2010 year-end conference call.

About Plug Power Inc.

The architects of modern fuel cell technology, Plug Power revolutionized the industry with cost-effective power solutions that increase productivity, lower operating costs and reduce carbon footprints. Long-standing relationships with industry leaders forged the path for our key accounts, including Walmart Canada, BMW, and FedEx Freight.  With more than 1,000 units in the field and over 2 million hours of runtime, Plug Power manufactures tomorrow’s incumbent power solutions today. Visit us at www.plugpower.com.

Nanotechnology researchers working on self-powered nanodevices – nanoscale systems that scavenge energy from their surrounding environment – have been experimenting with various power sources ranging from piezoelectric systems (”Electricity-generating silicone implants could power electronic devices”) to sound (”Nanotechnology energy generation using sound”). However, the most abundant energy available in biosystems is chemical and biochemical energy, such as glucose. Researchers in China have now reported a nanowire-based biofuel cell (NBFC) based on a single proton conductive polymer nanowire for converting chemical energy from biofluids into electricity, using glucose oxidase and laccase as catalyst. “We have demonstrated an innovative single nanowire biofuel cell for harvesting chemical/biochemical energy for powering in vivo nanodevices,” Caofeng Pan tells Nanowerk. “The output of our NBFC is sufficient to drive pH, glucose or photon sensors. The high output power, low cost and easy fabrication process, large-scale manufacturability, high ‘on-chip’ integrability and stability demonstrates its great potential for in vivo biosensing.” Pan is a post-doc researcher in Jing Zhu’s Group at the Beijing National Center for Electron Microscopy and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Tsinghua University. He is first author of a recent paper in Advanced Materials (”Generating Electricity from Biofluid with a Nanowire-Based Biofuel Cell for Self-Powered Nanodevices”) where the team, in collaboration with Georgia Tech’s Zhong Lin Wang, introduces their nano biofuel cell. “In previous work on nanowire-based bio fuel cells, we have reported a platinum-catalyzed fuel cell (”Nanowire-Based High-Performance ‘Micro Fuel Cells’: One Nanowire, One Fuel Cell”) and based on an individual nanowire” says Pan. “For our latest work, the whole cell can be accomplished at nano/micron scale, and the biofuel cell of a single nanowire generates an output power as high as 0.5-3 µW in glucose solution, in human blood and the juice of a watermelon. It has been integrated with a set of nanowire based sensors for performing self-powered sensing.” Design of a single Nafion/poly(vinyl pyrrolidone) compound nanowire-based biofuel cell. a) The nanowire lies on a substrate (of any kind), with both ends tightly bonded to the substrate and outlet interconnects. GOx and laccase are used as catalysts in the anode and cathode region, respectively. b) The NBFC is immersed into a biofuel solution, two chemical reactions occur in the anode and cathode regions, creating a corresponding chemical potential drop along the nanowire, which drives the flow of protons in the nanowire and electrons through the external load. (Reprinted with permission from Wiley-VCH Verlag) The proton exchange membrane is the key component in many of today’s fuel cells – and it is also a big obstacle to shrink the size of a fuel cell. Pan explains that, in the team’s early fuel cell research, they fabricated Nafion nanowires, which have an enhanced performance of proton conductivity compared with Nafion film. The Nafion nanowires have a diameter about 100 nm to 1 µm, and a length of about 20 µm. However, it turns out to be very difficult to build a platinum-catalyzed fuel cell on such a small nanowire as the anode and cathode reacting area needs to be strictly separated. In subsequent work, the scientists introduced a new method – electrospinning – to fabricate Nafion nanowires. Electrospinning is a very powerful method to produce polymer nanowires (such as Nafion). “With this method, we can easily produce Nafion nanowires as long as centimeters” says Pan “Now it became very easy for us to build a fuel cell based on an individual nanowire.” An additional approach to solve the miniaturization problem is to fabricate a biofuel cell instead of a fuel cell. In this case, an enzyme pair (such as GOx and Laccase) is used as catalysts. “The anode and cathode area need not to be separated again since enzymes are very selective to the reactants, for example, the GOx will only oxidize glucose, while Laccase will only reduce oxygen in the biofluid,” Pan explains. “As a result, the size of the fuel cell can be reduced again.” Studying the performance of the NBFC when directly interfacing with available ‘biofuels’ in the human body is necessary for exploring its potential applications in powering in vivo wireless nanodevices. The team found that their NBFC is strong enough to power nanowatts-consuming nanodevices, with the power output in glucose-containing PBS buffer solution reaching about 2.7 µW. The corresponding power output density is around 30 µW cm^-2. The performance of the NBFC driven by blood glucose was 0.5 µW. The researchers attributed this decrease in blood compared to glucose/PBS solution to partial enzyme inhibition by several compounds presented in human blood. Additional studies showed that the NBFC works even using watermelon juice as the biofuel, with the output of the NBFC being similar to those obtained using glucose solution and human blood as biofuels. The team also showed that their nano biofuel cell can be directly integrated with a single nanowire-based nanosensor for building a self-powered chemical- or bio-sensor. By integrating an NBFC with a single nanowire-based pH sensor or glucose sensor fabricated using ZnO nanowire, they formed a self-powered nanosensor. These results show that the NBFC provides a new approach for self-powered nanotechnology that harvests electricity from the environment for applications such as implantable biomedical devices, wireless sensors, and even portable electronics that are important for biological sciences, environmental monitoring, defense technology and even personal electronics. Pan says that the team will now try to build a self-powered nanosystem that can be used in biological sciences, environmental monitoring, defense technology and even personal electronics. Such a self-powered nanosystem should include the nanodevices, power harvesting unit, electrical measurement system, data processing logic system, and possibly wireless communication unit (RF technology). Another objective they try to achieve is to improve the output of the biofuel cell to a level that allows it to power a heart cardiac pacemaker by generating power from human blood. Reference: Pan, C., Wu, H., Wang, C., Wang, B., Zhang, L., Cheng, Z., Hu, P., Pan, W., Zhou, Z., Yang, X., & Zhu, J. (2008). Nanowire-Based High-Performance “Micro Fuel Cells”: One Nanowire, One Fuel Cell Advanced Materials, 20 (9), 1644-1648 DOI: 10.1002/adma.200700515 By Michael Berger. Copyright 2011 Nanowerk