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Description
The CORE project''s main aim is to support economic decarbonisation by utilizing green hydrogen as an energy carrier. The spot is on the fuel cells and water electrolysis as main technologies in allowing green energy conversion. The main target is to develop ground-breaking coatings for cost-effective and high-performance key components (bipolar plates) of the fuel cells and water electrolysers stacks. These components are used to collect and conduct electric current and heat in-between single cells of the stack, separate them from each other and at the same time to distribute gases and fluids. Currently, they represent up to 80 % of the weight and about 30 % of the cost of the entire stack assembly and thus represent essential components to be considered in reducing the cost and increasing the lifetime of water electrolysers and fuel cells stack. The CORE project aims to use an innovative filler manipulation technique based on the combination of the low-cost base material of the plate and the application of protective polymer-based layers on the surface. The proposed approach is simple but effective in solving the problem in terms of cost and performance optimization. The proposed approach can easily be upscaled and has the potential to quickly become an industrial solution for the fabrication of these key components.
The collaboration of the three partners involved (one from the Czech Republic and two from Norway) is key for the achievement of the project goals. The Norwegian partner CondAlign AS is in charge of fabrication of conductive films to be deposited on the plates. The other Norwegian partner SINTEF assists CondAlign in the achievement of properly coated plates and performs initial tests to ensure required coating quality. Finally, the expertise of the coordinator, UCT Prague, in testing and characterization of resulting electrochemical cells will be crucial to assess the feasibility of the implementation of the main idea behind the industrial scale.