{"id":3905,"date":"2020-10-15T23:43:24","date_gmt":"2020-10-15T18:13:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/?p=3905"},"modified":"2020-10-16T01:41:40","modified_gmt":"2020-10-15T20:11:40","slug":"spinach-can-power-up-fuel-cells-in-addition-to-popeye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/spinach-can-power-up-fuel-cells-in-addition-to-popeye\/","title":{"rendered":"Spinach can power up fuel cells in addition to Popeye"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Biomass-derived porous carbon materials are effective electrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), with promising applications in low-temperature fuel cells and metal\u2013air 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\u2013Nx 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Source: Spinach Gives Fuel Cells a Power Up <\/a><\/p>\n

– Suramya<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-emerging-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3905"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3909,"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3905\/revisions\/3909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.suramya.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}