Perfecting plasma power

Driving between Melbourne and Sydney, your last petrol station was not just kilometres ago, but years ago.

The year is 2030. Your car is powered by a quiet, emission-free fuel cell.

Goodbye smog. Goodbye to a large slab of greenhouse emissions.

For years now, automotive experts have been talking about The Next Big Thing in automobiles — the replacement of the internal combustion engine with a low-emission or emission-free powerplant.

The commercial reality of this technology still remains frustratingly distant, but has been brought a little closer by research into plasma technology at ANU.

This new technology has exciting ramifications for cars, but is designed with a higher aim, literally — to advance space travel and potentially, to propel the first manned interplanetary trip to Mars.

The team from the ANU Plasma Research Laboratory is to apply its expertise in plasma processing of surfaces to the development of fuel cells.

“We have to think about the future and about what we are going to do when the oil runs out and there is a big thrust for Australia to aim to use less carbon-based fuels,” said Professor Rod Boswell, head of the group.

“We are aiming to produce some patentable intellectual property that will make a Australia a key player in the hydrogen economy.”

The group is currently working with NASA and the European Space Agency to develop plasma thrusters for deep space exploration and plans to use plasma technology developed by Dr Christine Charles (pictured, centre, with Professor Boswell, right, and Phd candidate Orson Sutherland) to produce components for fuel cells.

“This is a really exciting development, with the potential to make fuel cells much cheaper to produce in future,” Dr Charles said.

“Using hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity, the cells’ only waste product is water, which is clearly a far more environmentally friendly substance than the carbon produced by today’s fossil fuels.

“Platinum plays a crucial role in operation of a fuel cell — but makes fuel cells very expensive. By reducing the amount of platinum required, we hope to make fuel cells a more viable alternative energy source for the future.”

In a fuel cell, energy is created by passing hydrogen from an anode through a special membrane to a cathode, where it mixes with oxygen to make water. The membrane allows only positively charged ions to pass, forcing the negative electrons along an electric circuit, creating a current.

For the process to work, both the anode and the cathode must be coated with a catalyst: platinum. The scarcity of platinum seemed likely to halt the progress of the fuel cell, as its high cost would make commercial production of a hydrogen car too costly to consider, but the intervention of the team at ANU could solve the problem.

The ANU contribution will be to find ways of using smaller amounts of platinum on the surface of the anode and cathode. They hope that rather than using a prohibitively expensive film of platinum, small amounts of the precious metal can be dotted across the surface to achieve the same effect.