From The DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory
3.25.24
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S Heather Duncan
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Roll-to-Roll Consortium.
Researchers at ORNL are contributing leadership to a new national consortium aimed at scaling up manufacturing of hydrogen technology. Credit: DOE ORNL.
The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is providing national leadership in a new collaboration among five national laboratories to accelerate U.S. production of clean hydrogen fuel cells and electrolyzers.
Hydrogen fuel cells provide power to electric vehicles and buildings using an electrochemical reaction that converts hydrogen and oxygen into heat, water and electricity. The Roll-to-Roll, or R2R, Consortium aims to scale up, speed up and reduce the cost of producing key components of fuel cells and electrolyzers where water molecules are split to make hydrogen. Improving manufacturing technologies for green hydrogen will help bring the U.S. closer to achieving its carbon reduction goals to slow climate change.
“The consortium’s goal is to accelerate commercialization of these fuel cells and electrolyzers through comprehensive understanding of full-scale materials development, electrode fabrication, advanced computing and quality control,” said ORNL scientist Alexey Serov.
As a member of DOE’s new Roll-to-Roll Consortium, ORNL is working on commercial scale-up of hydrogen fuel cell and electrolyzer components, such as this catalyst film being produced in ORNL’s Battery Manufacturing Laboratory. Credit: Alexey Serov/ORNL.
Serov and his colleague Yuepeng Zhang at the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory are deputy directors of the R2R Consortium, which is led by Scott Mauger at the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL. The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories are also partners in the consortium, funded by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office, or HFTO, through two provisions in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law: the Clean Hydrogen Electrolysis Program and the Clean Hydrogen Manufacturing and Recycling Program.
Both electrolyzers and fuel cells have parts similar to a battery: Positively and negatively charged electrodes on opposite poles draw ions through an electrolyte. A catalyst at the surface of the electrodes accelerates an electrochemical reaction, which separates or combines hydrogen and oxygen.To manufacture these devices, an active material is coated onto an underlayer being continuously moved by rollers – in other words, a “roll-to-roll” production process.
ORNL’s role in the R2R Consortium will focus on scaling up fuel cell and electrolyzer catalysts, which speed up reactions. Scientists at ORNL and Argonne National Laboratory are already collaborating on crucial aspects of this research. The ORNL team will be working with researchers at NREL on scalable methods of manufacturing electrodes for fuel cells and electrolyzers. Additionally, ORNL will lead a consortium effort on using computer modelling to understand fluid, heat and other flows in advanced chemical reactors for scaling up production of platinum and iridium electrocatalysts.
“ORNL’s team brings its unique expertise to co-lead an effort on materials scale-up though state-of-the art roll-to-roll coating capabilities, world-class imaging and microscopy, and advanced modelling and manufacturing processes redesign,” Serov said.
The goal is to rapidly develop and demonstrate new, cleaner and more affordable manufacturing processes to boost industry adoption of clean hydrogen technologies. Roll-to-roll manufacturing can reduce costs by increasing process efficiency and reducing material waste, but research will address challenges related to synthesizing materials, mixing, coating, drying and quality-control processes and equipment.
The consortium also plans to collaborate with industry on cooperative research and development agreements, with more details to be announced soon. An industrial advisory board will guide the consortium’s research objectives and increase engagement among manufacturers, materials suppliers and the hydrogen industry.
Home to the country’s largest open-access facility for battery manufacturing research and development, ORNL offers crucial opportunities to scale up laboratory discoveries using roll-to-roll coating, electron microscopes and other specialized tools. ORNL scientists Flavio Dal Forno Chuahy and David Cullen will join Serov to support consortium research.
R2R activities will also complement the work of other HFTO consortia, Hydrogen from Next-generation Electrolyzers of Water, orH2NEW, and Million Mile Fuel Cell Truck, or M2FCT. The R2R Consortium will develop processes and pathways to scale up materials and components developed by H2NEW and M2FCT and will work closely with both consortia to ensure relevant metrics, methods and protocols are used.
Together, these efforts will help advance DOE’s H2@Scale vision and Hydrogen Shot goal of reducing the cost of clean hydrogen to $1 per kilogram by 2031.
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Established in 1942, The DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the largest science and energy national laboratory in the Department of Energy system (by size) and third largest by annual budget. It is located in the Roane County section of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Its scientific programs focus on materials, neutron science, energy, high-performance computing, systems biology and national security, sometimes in partnership with the state of Tennessee, universities and other industries.
ORNL has several of the world’s top supercomputers, including Summit, ranked by the TOP500 as Earth’s seventh-most powerful.
The lab is a leading neutron and nuclear power research facility that includes the Spallation Neutron Source and High Flux Isotope Reactor.
It hosts the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, the BioEnergy Science Center, and the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Nuclear Reactors.
ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
Areas of research
ORNL conducts research and development activities that span a wide range of scientific disciplines. Many research areas have a significant overlap with each other; researchers often work in two or more of the fields listed here. The laboratory’s major research areas are described briefly below.
Chemical sciences – ORNL conducts both fundamental and applied research in a number of areas, including catalysis, surface science and interfacial chemistry; molecular transformations and fuel chemistry; heavy element chemistry and radioactive materials characterization; aqueous solution chemistry and geochemistry; mass spectrometry and laser spectroscopy; separations chemistry; materials chemistry including synthesis and characterization of polymers and other soft materials; chemical biosciences; and neutron science.
Electron microscopy – ORNL’s electron microscopy program investigates key issues in condensed matter, materials, chemical and nanosciences.
Nuclear medicine – The laboratory’s nuclear medicine research is focused on the development of improved reactor production and processing methods to provide medical radioisotopes, the development of new radionuclide generator systems, the design and evaluation of new radiopharmaceuticals for applications in nuclear medicine and oncology.
Physics – Physics research at ORNL is focused primarily on studies of the fundamental properties of matter at the atomic, nuclear, and subnuclear levels and the development of experimental devices in support of these studies.
Population – ORNL provides federal, state and international organizations with a gridded population database, called Landscan, for estimating ambient population. LandScan is a raster image, or grid, of population counts, which provides human population estimates every 30 x 30 arc seconds, which translates roughly to population estimates for 1 kilometer square windows or grid cells at the equator, with cell width decreasing at higher latitudes. Though many population datasets exist, LandScan is the best spatial population dataset, which also covers the globe. Updated annually (although data releases are generally one year behind the current year) offers continuous, updated values of population, based on the most recent information. Landscan data are accessible through GIS applications and a USAID public domain application called Population Explorer.
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