Gas 2.0

This is one of those topics I’m just not sure what to think of…

When the average person hears the term fuel cell, typically what comes to mind is something that mysteriously makes electricity from hydrogen. In reality the process isn’t all that mysterious—basically the hydrogen is split into its component parts (electrons and protons) and the protons are allowed to flow through the cell, but the electrons are forced to travel another path, which creates the current (and charges the battery or runs the motors or turns on the lights).

Although the hydrogen fuel cell is the most common type of cell, you can make fuel cells that use many different things, including hydrocarbons and sugars. They all work on the same basic principal, but hydrogen fuel cells are considered superior because their only emission is water vapor and they produce lots of energy.

• » See also: Copenhagen Opens First Hydrogen Fueling Station, Unveils Fleet of Fuel Cell Cars
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The Achilles heal of the hydrogen fuel cell is that it is damn expensive—for many reasons, not least of which is the platinum catalyst it uses to make electricity. If you could make an efficient fuel cell that used a much less expensive catalyst, was fueled by something easier to make and store than hydrogen, and had no net emissions, you might hold the key to our energy future.

That’s exactly what a group of researchers at Brigham Young University are aiming for—but they’ve gone about it in a very unorthodox manner using materials that most would consider un-environmentally friendly. The researchers have taken a common, cheap, weed-killing chemical known as viologen—you might also know it as paraquat—and discovered that it can be used as a catalyst in a fuel cell that uses carbohydrates (sugars) instead of hydrogen.

“Carbohydrates are very energy rich,” said BYU chemistry professor Gerald Watt. “What we needed was a catalyst that would extract the electrons from glucose and transfer them to an electrode.”

The team has found that through optimization of the fuel cell to this point they can convert 60% of the available energy in the sugars to usable energy—far higher than others have done with carbohydrates before. They think they can reach even higher conversion rates in the future.

On the one hand I’m thinking this is pretty cool. But on the other, couldn’t it have been something other than a herbicide? I mean, really. That just seems like cruel fate.

Their research is published in the October issue of the Journal of the Electrochemical Society.

Source: EurekAlert

Image Credit: WikiMedia Commons.

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