As data centers continue to emerge all across the United States, an increasing demand for electricity is created, and recently, it has gotten to a level that most areas struggle to support.
These facilities require drastic amounts of power to operate the computing equipment that these data centers use and keep it cool. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, data centers could potentially consume as much as 9% of annual U.S electricity generation by 2030, compared with the 4% demand that they took up in 2023.
However, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have been exploring potential solutions, including improvements to existing fuel cell technologies which could provide power to these centers without consuming drastic amounts of electricity.
A team led by Gang Wu, a professor at the McKelvey School of Engineering, has developed a new approach to producing both more efficient and more durable low-temperature fuel cells. The research which was conducted with scientists from Brookhaven, Lawrence, Northeastern University and the University of Pittsburgh’s national laboratories was published in Nature Nanotechnology.
The fuel cells themselves are capable of generating electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen which ends up producing both water and heat in the process. These catalysts are able to accelerate the chemical reaction that is happening within the fuel cells while reducing massive energy losses. The fuel cells are using platinum nanoparticles, particles that act as one of the most effective catalyst materials.
Due to the high cost and limited availability of platinum, platinum is often used sparingly. However, these particles are capable of dissolving, moving and growing during the functions of the fuel cells, which gradually reduces the performance of the cells.
The main focus of this research was on platinum intermetallic catalysts, which can improve both the activity and stability of the fuel cell. Producing these catalysts however can present its own challenge: temperatures below 700°C can preserve small nanoparticles but may not be high enough to create the highly ordered atomic structure needed for maximum performance within the fuel cell.
Wu’s team addressed this problem by creating a specialized carbon support made of hollow spheres with many holes containing radial nanochannels. The structure confines these platinum-cobalt nanoparticles, allowing them to remain small, prevent growth and evenly distribute them even when exposed to much higher temperatures. This even enabled the researchers to heat the catalyst to 1000°C which produced the desired structure of particles while keeping them below their maximum size.
“Our strategy is using this new carbon nanostructure to synthesize platinum cobalt intermetallic nanoparticles that can reduce precious metal content and enhance activity and stability,” Wu told Science Daily.
This approach is intended to overcome the traditional tradeoff between catalyst activity and durability by ensuring that both can be guaranteed.
Thus far, testing has demonstrated promising results as the catalyst has retained 85% of its performance after 150,000 severe voltage cycles which the researchers hypothesize could correspond to about 25,000 hours of operation.
“If a data center is able to supply its electricity itself by using a fuel cell,” Wu said, “it would directly convert hydrogen and other fuels into the electricity, reducing the burden on the energy grid.”
Through continued testing and eventually the pushing of the machine out to many of these data centers. It could drastically reduce the impact that these centers have on the energy grid and continue to make energy around the U.S. more affordable and clean.
