Smoltek Nanotech Holding AB announced that one of the world’s largest vehicle manufacturers is testing custom-made prototypes of a cell material that can significantly reduce the amount of iridium in an electrolyzer cell. The custom-made prototypes delivered by the subsidiary Smoltek Hydrogen have the potential to reduce the iridium load in electrolyzer cells by 95% compared to today’s commercial materials, which is a prerequisite for large-scale production of fossil-free hydrogen.

Smoltek Hydrogen, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Smoltek Group, has developed a cell material that can significantly reduce the amount of iridium in an electrolyzer cell. The vehicle manufacturer is very interested in the unique construction, and in this initial project, Smoltek Hydrogen has delivered a specially manufactured and customized cell material for testing and evaluation.

We have manufactured prototypes where carbon nanofibers were first coated with platinum, and then applied iridium according to the customer’s requests. It has taken time to figure out exactly how to configure the prototypes, so that they can also be tested in their laboratory, but now they have just started testing the prototypes to see if they meet their requirements.

If the test turns out well, we think this customer wants to start a larger project because they have big plans to use their fuel cell technology to also develop electrolyzers, and there seems to be no other solution to the iridium problem than the technology we have developed.

—Ellinor Ehrnberg, President of Smoltek Hydrogen

The prototypes are based on Smoltek’s unique and patent-protected carbon nanotechnology, where the objective is to reduce the iridium load in the anode electrode in electrolyzer cells by 95% (which corresponds to 0.1 mg iridium/cm²), compared to today's commercial materials (which use 2.0 mg iridium/cm²).

Smoltek Hydrogen has already proven in long-term tests that the company’s cell material can produce the same amount of hydrogen at only 0.2 mg iridium/cm², which makes it hopeful of reaching the final goal of 0.1 mg iridium/cm².

The project with this customer has its background in the presentations of the technology that Smoltek Hydrogen carried out during the Electrochemical Society meeting in Gothenburg last fall, and next week we will present updated results at the 245^th ECS meeting, which will be held in San Francisco.

—Ellinor Ehrnberg

Smoltek Hydrogen’s technology for the anode side electrode reduces the iridium load towards 0.1 mg/cm².

Smoltek Hydrogen is developing a vertical nanofiber-based material for the anode porous transport layer (PTL) in PEM electrolyzer cells. The material consists of a sintered porous titanium layer with nanofibers, a conformal platinum corrosion protection and iridium catalyst (a thin nanoparticle layer of iridium). The material is one of the layers in an electrolyzer cell.