A new iron catalyst could make hydrogen fuel cells cheaper to make

 Fuel cells are expensive and complex to make. They used Platinum and other rare earth metals which are rare and expensive, and this makes fuel cells expensive to manufacture. A teams of researchers at the University of Buffalo, have created a new much cheaper catalyst which is as good as the Platinum one, but much cheaper. The researchers have described in their paper published in Nature Energy, how iron can be combined with nitrogen and carbon to produce a catalyst that is efficient, durable and inexpensive. Using heat treatment with ammonia chloride followed by high-temperature deposition of a thin layer of nitrogen-doped carbon on the catalyst surface, they have made a stable and efficient catalyst for the Fuel Cell. Iron is appealing as a catalyst because it is abundant and inexpensive. However, it does not perform as well as platinum, especially because it lacks the durability to withstand the highly corrosive and oxidative environments inside fuel cells. To overcome this barrier, the research team bonded four nitrogen atoms to the iron. Researchers then embedded the material in a few layers of graphene with accurate atomic control of local geometric and chemical structures. 



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