News

A core group of five national labs within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is working to advance fuel cell performance and durability. In a recent DOE webinar, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) scientist Adam Weber provided an overview of this work. The Fuel Cell Consortium for Performance and Durability (FC-PAD) aims to accelerate improvements in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel... Read more

In a recent Facebook post, Energy Secretary Rick Perry lauds the DOE’s national labs and “the incredible work being undertaken by our nation’s brightest minds.” The post includes a video that features his visit to all 17 national labs, including Berkeley Lab.... Read more

October 8 marks the 4th annual National Hydrogen Day—a date that gives a nod to the atomic weight of hydrogen (1.008) and to the increasing role hydrogen fuel is playing nationally. Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists are working every day on research that allows hydrogen to be produced, stored, and used in cleaner and even more efficient and affordable ways.Hydrogen fuel is... Read more

Adam Weber, who leads the Energy Conversion Group within Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Energy Technologies Area, was recently named to the Electrochemical Society's 2018 Class of Fellows. The fellows are chosen for their scientific achievements, leadership and service to the society.Weber's current research involves understanding and optimizing fuel-cell and electrolyzer performance and... Read more

After serving four years as Berkeley Lab's Associate Director for Energy Technologies, Ramamoorthy Ramesh will be returning to his research in ultra low-power electronics while also helping to lead a major Berkeley Lab research initiative in next-generation, energy-efficient microelectronics.This new initiative has been dubbed "Beyond Moore's Law," as it seeks the solution to what will happen when... Read more

Ravi Prasher has been appointed Associate Laboratory Director for Energy Technologies at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The announcement follows an international search.Prasher, an internationally renowned scientist in the field of thermal energy science and technologies, has been director of Berkeley Lab's Energy Storage and Distributed Resources... Read more

Vi Rapp, a researcher in the Energy Conversion Group, was recently honored by Berkeley Lab for her professional accomplishments and contributions in the area of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math outreach.At an Oscars-style celebration at Berkeley Lab on June 9, 2018, a big crowd of family, friends, and colleagues cheered as each awardee took center stage. Sixteen women were recognized for... Read more

Researchers from the Energy Conversion Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory gave talks at the 233rd meeting of the Electrochemical Society (ECS), which was held May 13-17 in Seattle. The semiannual ECS meeting gathers experts in solid state and electrochemical science.In one of the presentations, the Berkeley Lab scientists discussed the potential for improving performance in redox flow... Read more

Scientists from the Energy Conversion Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently presented at the American Physical Society March 2018 Meeting in Los Angeles. At the event, more than 11,000 physicists, scientists and students from all over the world converged to share research.Peter Dudenas, Andrew Crothers and Ahmet Kusoglu helped showcase the group's work at the conference,... Read more

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's Weber Group, a part of the Energy Conversion Group, have published new research that could have significant implications for how specific fuel cell materials perform in different environments. Their paper, "Exploring substrate/ionomer interaction under oxidizing and reducing environments," was published in the February 2018 issue of Electrochemistry... Read more

Adam Weber, leader of the Energy Conversion Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was quoted in a Vox story about efforts at commercial-scale hydrogen production.There's currently “a resurgence of hydrogen-based activity around the world,” Weber says in the Feb. 16 story, "This company may have solved one of the hardest problems in clean energy." Weber refers to the pursuit of... Read more

A paper recently published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry and co-authored by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab researcher Adam Weber looks at the effects of electrolyte buffer capacity in electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction.The study used both experimental and simulation approaches to show how the buffer capacity of electrolytes affects the kinetics and equilibrium of surface reactant... Read more

A new diagnostic tool for analyzing polymer-electrolyte (PEM) fuel-cell degradation has been developed by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's Energy Conversion Group. The simple and fast tool, described in a paper published in January in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, is based on analyzing changes in polarization curves of a cell over its lifetime.The research found that... Read more

Proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells have the potential to cleanly power cars and provide stationary power, but cost and durability are major barriers to commercialization. To rapidly evaluate materials that can help overcome these issues, accelerated stress tests must be developed.A recent paper co-authored by researchers at the Energy Conversion Group at Lawrence Berkeley National... Read more

Like a well-tended greenhouse garden, a specialized type of hydrogen fuel cell – which shows promise as a clean, renewable next-generation power source for vehicles and other uses – requires precise temperature and moisture controls to be at its best. If the internal conditions are too dry or too wet, the fuel cell won’t function well.But seeing inside a working fuel cell at the tiny scales... Read more

Ahmet Kusoglu, of the Energy Storage and Distributed Resources Division, has received the Supramaniam Srinivasan Young Investigator Award of The Electrochemical Society recognizing outstanding young researchers in the field of energy technology. Kusoglu will receive his award at the 2017 Spring ECS meeting.... Read more

There will be a celebration going on in the Berkeley Hills this weekend, and it's not just a student party or football game.Rather, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) and from all over the world will be celebrating the second annual National Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Day on Saturday, October 8, 2016.National Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Day was created to help build awareness of... Read more

New projects for hydrogen storage and fuel cell performance aim to bring down cost of fuel cell electric vehicles.With commitments from leading car and stationary-power manufacturers to hydrogen and fuel cell technologies and the first ever fuel cell electric vehicle to go on sale later this year, interest is once again swelling in this carbon-free technology. Now, thanks to several new projects... Read more

Berkeley Lab and UNC-Chapel Hill’s discovery of nonflammable electrolyte gets VC funding. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) battery scientist Nitash Balsara has worked for many years trying to find a way to improve the safety of lithium-ion batteries. Now he believes he has found the answer in a most unlikely material—a class of compounds that has mainly been used for... Read more

The White House has announced that Adam Weber has won a Presidential Early Career Award. Weber is a staff scientist at the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). His current research involves understanding and optimizing fuel-cell performance and lifetime; understanding flow batteries for grid-scale energy storage; and analysis of... Read more

In the quest to produce an environmentally benign renewable fuel, scientists have explored many techniques to split water molecules to produce hydrogen. Still, the current photovoltaic designs are not yet technically or economically viable. Materials research in this area has been promising, but research on the engineering design of these photoelectrochemical systems has been sparse.To advance... Read more

Fuel cells as a power generator simply look too good to be true. They're quiet, they don't produce criteria pollutants, and they're efficient electricity producers. They can be placed right next to a building without adding miles of transmission lines, and they won't bother passers-by any more than a fire hydrant or a dumpster—less than a dumpster.But they're not the perfect power source, not... Read more