KennyR wrote:
One of the biggest problems with fuel cells is price. To get reactions to happen at that scale (you're actually burning the fuel), you need a catalyst - namely platinum and rhodium. Platinum is worth more than gold, and rhodium is the most expensive metal on today's market.
Although the design of the catalysts use as little of these precious metals as possible, they do use them, and it's likely it would cost less for many lead-acid/nickel-cadmium batteries than it would for one fuel cell. While the fuel cell would be a lot cheaper in the long run, the short run would make the price-obsessed world market ignore them. This is the first big hurdle fuel cell technology has to face.
And we all know that people are price obsessed, don't we? (/me points finger accusingly at x86 crowd)
Given that I have designed and build several Fuel cells (I'm a Chemist you see), I would like to point out that the catalyst in a fuel cell is actually Nickel!
In a hydrogen oxygen (Bacon) fuel cell, the nickel catalyst is all you need.
When using Methanol, you need a regenerator, where I used Steam as the catalyst to change the Methanol into hydrgen and Carbon dioxide.
I'm not sure how these portable fuel cells regenerate hydrogen from Methanol, it's possible that platinum might be a suitable catalyst, but I syspect that a Steel catalyst might be suitable.
Although I managed to get about 1 volt per cell the current was tiny, I guess the high price of these cell is due to the very complex manufacturing process needed to get a high surface area, and thus a high current. I also had the problem that the electrolyte was poisoned by the water produced in the reaction (I believe the CO2 poisoned my Nickel too... :-? )
