In the new year, politics, science and industry must continue to dedicate themselves to the task of driving forward sustainable energy production with hydrogen in order to make a significant contribution to achieving their climate protection targets, without losing sight of the economic factors. In addition to the mobility sector, where not only air and sea transport but also heavy goods traffic is already being partly converted to fuel cell propulsion, industry, e.g. steel production, will also play an important role.
HyFab, the "Research Factory for Fuel Cells and Hydrogen," as the Baden-Württemberg Ministry for the Environment, Climate and Energy Management calls it on its website, aims to pool the know-how of science and industry to make the production of fuel cell components such as the bipolar plate more suitable for series production and thus more cost-effective.
The project, which is funded by the Ministry of the Environment, the Baden-Württemberg state government as well as by industry, sees itself as an "open, flexible platform [...] in which technologies for component manufacturing and component qualification [...] can be researched and tested," according to the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems.
With this in mind, Fabian Kapp talked to Dr. Ludwig Jörissen. Together with the expert for electrochemical energy conversion and storage from the Zentrum für Sonnenenergie- und Wasserstoff-Forschung Baden-Württemberg (ZSW), the Graebener® managing director devotes himself to elementary topics such as the joint pooling of interests and knowledge between research and medium-sized companies, individual special features in the production of key elements for the fuel cell as well as the upscaling to industrial mass production with special consideration of cost reduction.
You can watch the 40-minute interview in full here. If you are only interested in a specific topic, please refer to the show notes, which we have provided for you below.
Shownotes
00:04:23
Are there ways to perfect the fuel cell in terms of market requirements?
00:08:24
The need for application laboratories for the production of bipolar plates
00:12:19
State-of-the-art technologies for series-ready and cost-efficient bipolar plate production
00:20:03
The importance of the fuel cell away from the mobility sector
00:24:28
HyFab: Initial successes and research results
00:28:40
Research and industry: The importance of joint knowledge pooling
00:36:58
Why the application area of the bipolar plate initially plays a minor role compared to its design and production process.