Prof. ZHANG Xiao, Assistant Professor and Presidential Young Scholar of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been awarded the Innovation and Technology Fund - Innovation and Technology Support Programme (ITF-ITSP) research grant of around 1.4 million Hong Kong dollars for a Nanotechnology and Materials Science project.
The project is titled "Mass Production of Low-cost High-efficiency Catalysts for Anion Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (AEMFCs)". As the project investigator, Prof. ZHANG will lead a 1.5-year project, in collaboration with Siphone Science and Technology Limited.
Anion exchange membrane fuel cells (AEMFCs) offer a promising alternative to proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) due to their ability to use non-precious metal catalysts with reduced costs. However, the sluggish anodic reaction of AEMFCs, i.e., hydrogen oxidation reaction (HOR), requires a higher amount of platinum (Pt) catalysts, resulting in higher costs and posing a significant economic challenge for the development of high-performance AEMFCs.
This project aims to address this challenge by mass production of low-cost, but efficient HOR catalyst. Isolated Pt on metallic substrates using a hydrothermal and dipping strategy developed by the project group will be created, which can produce 3000-mg-catalysts/time/batch, with the HOR activity nearly ten times higher than that of commercial catalysts. The technology developed in this project has a high potential for commercialization as it can be easily applied to existing catalyst development and fuel cell production lines.
Launched in November 1999, the Innovation and Technology Support Programme (ITSP) (Platform & Seed) aims to support applied research and development (R&D) projects undertaken by R&D Centres or designated local public research institutes, aiming to transfer the R&D results to local industries, with strong commercialisation potential or exploratory and forward-looking in nature.
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