Palcan Gets Grant to Produce Commercial System

Palcan Power Systems Inc. of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, has reached an agreement with the Industrial Research Assistance Program of Canada whereby the National Research Council of Canada will contribute up to $300,000 over the next 14 months to enable Palcan to complete the development of a commercial portable fuel cell power system.

The company has developed a successful 300W air-cooled fuel cell module prototype on which the production has its base. Palcan has three FC stack designs, two of which are air cooled (the PC3 and PC5) and one which is water cooled (the PC6). While these stacks are successful prototypes, their operating systems are not transferable or compatible with one another. This project will identify architecture commonality between operating systems, identify common components representing the common architecture subsets and develop a new architecture system subset that can be applied to Palcan’s range of FC stacks across all power levels.

The goal of this project is to develop a 300W portable fuel cell system designed ready for consumer use. The unit will incorporate Palcan’s rare earth, metal-hydride, hydrogen storage canisters as well as a pop on-off mechanism for ease of use. A hydrogen volumetric reading mechanism will also be developed as part of the project.