A lot of us grew up with watching Popeye get a power boost from eating Spinach, now thanks to the research done at American University we found that spinach can also be used to give fuel cell’s a boost. Historically we have used platinum based catalysts in fuel cells but since platinum is very expensive & hard to obtain teams have been looking for alternatives. They found that due to the high Iron & nitrogen content of Spinach they were able to create a viable Catalyst.
To prepare the catalyst, you need to wash the leaves & pulverize into a juice followed by freeze drying the result. This frozen juice is ground into a powder, melamine and salts like sodium chloride & potassium chloride are added. After this the composite is pyrolyzed at 900 C a couple of times resulting in the catalyst. The results so far have been quite promising but there still needs to be a lot more research done to see if this is viable when done at a commercial scale. The biggest advantage of using Spinach is that it is a renewable & sustainable source of biomass.
Biomass-derived porous carbon materials are effective electrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), with promising applications in low-temperature fuel cells and metal–air batteries. Herein, we developed a synthesis procedure that used spinach as a source of carbon, iron, and nitrogen for preparing porous carbon nanosheets and studied their ORR catalytic performance. These carbon sheets showed a very high ORR activity with a half-wave potential of +0.88 V in 0.1 M KOH, which is 20 mV more positive than that of commercial Pt/C catalysts. In addition, they showed a much better long-term stability than Pt/C and were insensitive to methanol. The remarkable ORR performance was attributed to the accessible high-density active sites that are primarily from Fe–Nx moieties. This work paves the way toward the use of metal-enriching plants as a source for preparing porous carbon materials for electrochemical energy conversion and storage applications.
The next step in the process is to create a fuel cell using this catalyst and the team is exploring collaboration options with other research groups.
Source: Spinach Gives Fuel Cells a Power Up
– Suramya