In a joint press relase the com­pa­nies states that the test­ing cam­paign will specif­i­cal­ly eval­u­ate the long-term oper­a­tional sta­bil­i­ty of Smoltek’s pro­pri­etary nanos­truc­tured irid­i­um cat­a­lyst lay­er, mark­ing a crit­i­cal step toward the com­mer­cial­iza­tion and large-scale indus­tri­al­iza­tion of cost-effec­tive green hydro­gen production.

This joint effort direct­ly address­es one of the pri­ma­ry bot­tle­necks in scal­ing PEM elec­trol­y­sis: the high cost of irid­i­um. By dras­ti­cal­ly reduc­ing the required load­ing with­out sac­ri­fic­ing dura­bil­i­ty. Smoltek Hydro­gen and Her­aeus Pre­cious Met­als are paving the way for the expan­sion of the glob­al green hydro­gen infrastructure.

“Our nanos­truc­tured lay­er offers a unique capa­bil­i­ty to max­i­mize charge and mass trans­port prop­er­ties with­in a thick­ness of just a few microns. By opti­miz­ing this spe­cif­ic cat­a­lyst archi­tec­ture, we can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly main­tain high elec­trolyz­er effi­cien­cy while suc­cess­ful­ly reduc­ing the amount of irid­i­um need­ed to below 0.1 mg/​cm² load­ing.”
Fabi­an Wenger, Head of R&D at Smoltek Hydrogen

The col­lab­o­ra­tion lever­ages Smoltek’s inno­v­a­tive nan­otech­nol­o­gy along­side Her­aeus Pre­cious Met­als’ world-class exper­tise in pre­cious met­al elec­tro­cat­a­lysts and mate­r­i­al analy­sis. Test­ing and val­i­da­tion are cen­tral to tran­si­tion­ing this break­through from the lab­o­ra­to­ry to indus­tri­al appli­ca­tion. Her­aeus Pre­cious Met­als will lead the upcom­ing test­ing phase, bring­ing exten­sive resources to eval­u­ate the cat­a­lyst’s per­for­mance under real­is­tic oper­a­tional conditions.

“We are look­ing for­ward to com­mencecom­menc­ing this exten­sive test­ing cam­paign and to pro­vide the crit­i­cal mate­r­i­al analy­sis required to val­i­date this tech­nol­o­gy. With our capa­bil­i­ties we will con­tin­ue to sup­port all steps towards an indus­tri­al­iza­tion of these high­ly promis­ing ultra-low irid­i­um PTEs with our com­pre­hen­sive ana­lyt­i­cal and test­ing capa­bil­i­ties.”
Chris­t­ian Gebauer, Head of Inno­va­tion at the Hydro­gen Sys­tems Divi­sion of Her­aeus Pre­cious Metals

---

• Read the offi­cial press release: Smoltek Hydro­gen and Her­aeus Pre­cious Met­als Advance Next-Gen­er­a­tion Ultra-Low Irid­i­um Elec­trol­y­sis Technology