1 October 2009

Sugar, weed killer hike fuel cell power potential

There is a new type of fuel cell that uses a common weed killer to harvest electricity from glucose and other sugars.

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

That is where the weed killer comes in. The effectiveness of this cheap and abundant herbicide is a boon to carbohydrate-based fuel cells. By contrast, hydrogen-based fuel cells like those developed by General Motors require costly platinum as a catalyst.

The next step for the BYU team is to ramp up the power through design improvements.

The study reported experiments yielding a 29% conversion rate, or the transfer of seven of the 24 available electrons per glucose molecule.

“We showed you can get a lot more out of glucose than other people have done before,” said Dean Wheeler, lead faculty author of the paper and a chemical engineering professor in BYU’s Fulton College of Engineering and Technology. “Now we’re trying to get the power density higher, so the technology will be more commercially attractive.”

Since they wrote the paper, the researchers’ prototype has achieved a doubling of power performance. And as we speak, they continue pursuing an even stronger sugar high.

For related information, go to www.isa.org/manufacturing_automation.