Smoltek Hydrogen has finalized design of a Prototype Coater tool for carbon nanofibers

Smoltek Hydro­gen is work­ing on solv­ing the biggest pain point of PEM elec­trolyz­ers – “The Irid­i­um prob­lem”. Irid­i­um is need­ed as cat­a­lyst on the anode side in an elec­trolyz­er cell. How­ev­er, irid­i­um is extreme­ly expen­sive and most of all scarce and a lim­it­ed resource, and the short­age of irid­i­um is rec­og­nized as the sin­gle most severe threat towards scal­ing up PEM elec­trolyz­ers. For this rea­son, the hydro­gen indus­try is eager to find a new, game-chang­ing tech­nol­o­gy that can sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduce the irid­i­um load. 

Smoltek Hydro­gen has a solu­tion to this par­tic­u­lar prob­lem, by intro­duc­ing an ultra-thin irid­i­um coat­ing on the porous trans­port lay­er side instead of the mem­brane, and where the sur­face area first has been enlarged by coat­ing the sur­face with cor­ro­sion pro­tect­ed ver­ti­cal car­bon nanofibers.
Smoltek Hydro­gen aims to reduce the irid­i­um amount with 95% com­pared to today’s stan­dard mate­r­i­al (that uses ca 2.5 mg iridium/​cm²), and has recent­ly com­plet­ed a 1,000 hour dura­bil­i­ty test with only 0.2 mg iridium/​cm² (Read about the test).

Man­u­fac­tur­ing tech­nolo­gies to enable scale-up of PEM elec­trolyz­ers
Besides hav­ing a game chang­ing tech­nol­o­gy, Smoltek Hydro­gen also need to be able to man­u­fac­ture the elec­trolyz­er cell mate­r­i­al in large vol­umes. Today the sam­ples are pro­duced with lab­o­ra­to­ry tech­nolo­gies, in low quan­ti­ties and with typ­i­cal area of only a few square cen­time­ters, where­as the indus­tri­al man­u­fac­tur­ing con­cept must be scal­able to the high vol­umes fore­seen, which is tens of thou­sands of square meters a year, and beyond. 

An impor­tant first step towards indus­tri­al­iza­tion and com­mer­cial­iza­tion of the Smoltek Hydro­gen elec­trolyz­er cell mate­r­i­al is prac­ti­cal val­i­da­tion of the select­ed con­cept for the growth of nanofibers, since it is a dif­fer­ent type of Plas­ma Enhanced Chem­i­cal Vapor Depo­si­tion (PECVD) process than used today. In order to do this Smoltek Hydro­gen has, togeth­er with AGC Plas­ma Tech­nol­o­gy Solu­tions, designed a new ded­i­cat­ed Pro­to­type Coater tool that will be placed in the Chalmers MC2 facil­i­ties in Gothen­burg, where Smoltek cur­rent­ly has its nanofiber fab­ri­ca­tion operations.

The Pro­to­type Coater is a pow­er­ful tool with small foot­print and will pro­vide an impor­tant plat­form for con­tin­ued devel­op­ment of indus­tri­al growth recipes. The ambi­tion with the tool is to com­bine scal­able AGC lin­ear hol­low cath­ode PECVD tech­nol­o­gy and our exper­tise in grow­ing car­bon nanofibers. We fine tune dif­fer­ent growth con­di­tions and select the para­me­ters most suit­able for fur­ther scale-up. The tool will also enable us to man­u­fac­ture rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ples to cus­tomers with indus­tri­al scal­able technology.

Shafiq Kabir, Head of Vol­ume Process­es at Smoltek Hydrogen

Based on the learn­ings from val­i­da­tion of the Pro­to­type Coater, Smoltek Hydro­gen aims to order a Pilot Coater, which is a small­er ver­sion of a high-vol­ume tool. This is also a cru­cial com­po­nent of AGC’s busi­ness mod­el, since they guar­an­tee the per­for­mance of the vol­ume machine if their small­er coater is used to spec­i­fy its require­ments. The Pilot Coater will be used to pro­duce test series for cus­tomers as well as for ver­i­fi­ca­tion of the pro­duc­tion tech­nolo­gies before vol­ume manufacturing.

About AGC
AGC Plas­ma Tech­nol­o­gy Solu­tions is a new busi­ness unit with­in AGC Glass Europe SA, a Euro­pean leader in flat glass. AGC Plas­ma Tech­nol­o­gy Solu­tions is pro­vid­ing low-pres­sure plas­ma coat­ing tech­nol­o­gy and equip­ment. AGC Plas­ma is an expan­sive team of plas­ma coat­ing experts spe­cial­ized in inno­v­a­tive PVD and PECVD appli­ca­tions from R&D and new prod­uct devel­op­ment all the way through to equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­ing and oper­a­tional man­age­ment of mass pro­duc­tion coat­ing plants. Vis­it the web­site www.agc-plasma.com to learn more about the equip­ment and ser­vices offered by AGC Plas­ma Tech­nol­o­gy Solutions.

Peo­ple pic­tured in the top pho­to, from left: Amin Saleeem, Bastien Pen­ninckx, Shafik Kabir, Erwan-Axel Mor­ris­son (AGC), Fabi­an Wenger, Jeroen Schot­saert (AGC), Elli­nor Ehrn­berg, Réka Simon-Balint.