Ilika Technologies Awarded Carbon Trust Grant

Ilika Technologies Ltd, the materials discovery company, is delighted to announce that it has been awarded a grant by the Carbon Trust to undertake a three year research programme to develop new catalysts for fuel cells.

Ilika is using the applied research grant to scale-up research into technically viable and commercially more attractive alternatives to platinum catalysts for proton exchange membrane (“PEM”) fuel cells. These alternative catalysts are expected to overcome the cost and availability constraints associated with platinum, thereby extending the application of PEM fuel cells.

PEM fuel cells have already been trialled successfully by major automotive manufacturers in green energy cars and in portable and stationary power applications.

Previous work by Ilika has identified palladium alloy as a viable alternative to platinum in catalysts. Palladium does not suffer from the same high cost pressures as platinum and offers the prospect of lower cost catalysts. Indeed, the alloys identified by Ilika already exhibit performance levels three times that of platinum on an equal cost basis.

Before bulk manufacturers are able to produce these cheaper catalysts, the exact relationships between alloy composition, particle size, substrate type and electrocatalytic performance need to be established. This information will present a matrix with a very large number of combinations of these characteristics which, using conventional development techniques, would be very expensive to produce and investigate. However, Ilika has developed proprietary, high throughput synthesis and screening techniques that will allow the above investigations to be carried out in an economic and time-efficient manner to establish optimum catalyst systems.

Ilika’s patented catalysts will be licensed to select commercial partners with the infrastructure and market presence to produce and sell the catalysts on a large scale.

Graeme Pudy, CEO of Ilka, said: “Developing new materials for energy conversion is one of Ilika’s key strategic business goals. We are using the full power of our technology to accelerate the discovery of novel materials for fuel cell, solid oxide fuel cell, battery and photovoltaic devices. We are very pleased to receive this award from the Carbon Trust as we are committed to low carbon innovation and to finding materials solutions for the new emerging energy technologies.”

Garry Staunton, Technology Director at the Carbon Trust said: “The Carbon Trust’s Applied Research scheme aims to help promising low carbon technologies progress towards commercial reality and large scale deployment. The Ilika project that we are supporting has the potential to identify lower cost materials for use in the exciting area of fuel cells. Fuel cells have the potential to play a significant role in a low carbon economy since they could find use in applications as diverse as powering a laptop or a car. The Carbon Trust has provided support to many actors in this dynamic field and believes that the Ilika project could further strengthen UK fuel cell capacity.”