MEETING REPORT

Fuel Cells for Portable Applications Conference
Boston, Massachusetts
September 5-6, 2002

By Dennis Sieminski
Portable Energy Think Tank
DennisSieminski@msn.com, Phone (770) 241-3052

THE CONFERENCE ON “Fuel Cells for Portable Applications” was held at the Hilton Back Bay Hotel in Boston. The event was sponsored by EyeforFuelCells, a London-based company that runs executive-level conferences, publishes newsletters and builds web communities for various industries. (See www.eyeforfuelcells.com for their newsletter and pay-for-view premium content site which includes transcripts and PowerPoint presentations from this conference.) About 150 people representing a wide cross-section of the fuel cell industry attended the conference, which provided a mix of presentations, panel sessions, and networking opportunities. The following are synopses of most of the presentations along with contact information.

Revolutionizing the Stack Manufacturing Process

There has been a lot of attention to and emphasis on the material cost of fuel cells. And rightfully so, with platinum and precious metal catalysts standing out as top line cost items on the bill of materials. Assembly costs have received much less attention, although they also loom as a major cost obstacle to a mass market pricing. Consider that fuel cell stacks are sensitive to compression and impact and 18 cells must be layered to get a nominal 12 volts out. Further, each layer is typically gasketed to plumb air, fuel and cooling water. The general thinking on reducing labor costs here is understandable and probably follows the line of thinking that automation and manufacturing engineering can be applied to stack designs once they are finalized and customers clearly identified. Protonex has jumped ahead of this type of linear product and business planning. It has attacked the fuel cell business from the standpoint of what can be done to make the fuel cell stack production-ready today. Its solution is an insert injection molding approach to fuel cell stack construction. Borrowing from technology used to make filtration cassettes in the pharmaceutical industry, the electrodes are placed into a mold and the seals and housing are formed around them. This solution not only solves the cost problem – the claim is that it will cost 1/5 of the cost of conventional methods – but apparently also results in a more reliable stack that may even weigh less. There are no dynamic seals, relaxed tolerances can be applied to the materials used, and roll-to-toll MEAs can be implemented. Protonex provided an idea of stack cost for various order quantities and sizes; it is summarized in the following table.

At the moment, Protonex is concentrating on PEM fuel cells in the10W-3000W size range. Perhaps the question to ask is, “Will they be the Dell of fuel cell stacks?”

Presenter: Paul Oesener, Chief Technology Officer, Protonex Technology Corporation, Marlborough, Massachusetts,
www.Protonex.com.

Technological Breakthrough – A New Concept for Portable Fuel Cells

The French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) engages in R&D outside of nuclear energy. It has programs in fundamental research, defense, and technology for industry. One of the programs under the technology-for-industry umbrella looks at high potential payback areas in new energy technology for the information and communication industry. The starting point of this group is that there is a major opportunity for power in portable communicating tools (laptop computers, cellphones) if it can meet present battery size and weight but provide the combination of fast-charging independence from the AC grid and longer operating time. These requirements brought them to fuel cells. In their analysis of fuel cell technology, they reached two key conclusions regarding the ability of the technology to meet the size constraints they had set: 1) existing approaches to membrane assemblies would have to be abandoned; and 2) an alternative source of hydrogen would need to be found. As a substitute for membrane-type electrodes, they embarked on a program to use microelectronic fabrication techniques and processes for core fuel cell architecture in September 2000. At the present time, they have achieved electrode performance of 40mW/cm2, using silicon micro fabrication processes.

On the issue of fuel, among the choices considered were pressurized hydrogen, metallic hydrides, carbon nanotubes, sodium borohydride and direct methanol. None was deemed capable of meeting the size constraints. Either the fuel and container itself or the hardware to handle the fuel would be too large. They embarked on a search for alternatives. The result is a patent for an on-demand hydrogen gas-generating device that meets their size criteria. In developing this technology, they enlisted an industrial partner, the SNPE group, which has experience in gas generation with energetic materials in products such as automotive air bags. On the strength of these developments, CEA will be expanding its staff in the energy program from about 20 to 35 people.

The presenter of this paper was Didier Bloch, Manager, Energy for Electronics Program, French Atomic Energy Commision (CEA), Grenoble, France, email: blochd@chartreuse.cea.fr