________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Hydrogen
cost effective, as the cost of materials and processing should be lower. Fuel cells also don’ t require the same volume of exotic materials as batteries, as they only use a small amount of platinum, and they don’ t have the same issues around recycling, as around 95 percent of the material can be recycled. Fuel cells also offer a longer life than batteries- a typical automotive battery would have an operational life of around 8000hrs, where fuel cells today already achieve double that life and even then, only the stack needs replacing with other components achieving even longer life.
The safety of using hydrogen as a fuel is also something that is often questioned. In fact, hydrogen has been widely used in industry for decades and the safety standards for the fuel are well developed. The fuel cells themselves, as well as the rest of the hydrogen system, are designed to a high safety level with multiple sensors to defect faults or leaks and automatic shutdown if any issues are detected.
In summary, hydrogen fuel cells provide a practical option to replace technology that pollutes, with operational benefits over batteries and potential to be more cost effective when produced in volume. ■
Greg Harris www. intelligent-energy. com
Greg Harris is CCO at Intelligent Energy, a leader in the development and manufacture of cuttingedge hydrogen fuel cells that overcome the limitations of conventional battery-powered systems. The privately-owned company, which has 600 patents in place, has been innovating for more than two decades in the automotive, aerospace, power generation, telecoms, materials handling and unmanned aerial vehicle( UAV) sectors.
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