Dangerous Behavior on College Campuses
Making the Hydrogen Car Viable
Connecting Environmental Science and Public Policy
Probing the Evolution of Galaxies
Answering Fundamental Questions About the Universe
Examining Bacteria's Response to Oxidative Stress
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Making the Hydrogen Car Viable
Plentiful, nontoxic, environmentally friendly and efficient, hydrogen holds considerable promise as a long-term alternative fuel, which is why the federal government is funding a five-year, $1.2 billion project through President Bush's Hydrogen Fuel Initiative to accelerate hydrogen and fuel-cell research. Burning the gas releases no carbon dioxide, and if fed into a fuel-cell stack—a battery-like device that generates electricity from a fuel (such as hydrogen) and oxygen—it can propel an electric vehicle with only water and heat as byproducts.
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Sunita Satyapal '85 |
One of the challenges for scientists is determining how to store hydrogen on vehicles in a consumer-friendly way. Because it is a low-density gas, says Sunita Satyapal '85, hydrogen is difficult to store in the volume required to provide the driving range expected in cars and trucks. Other obstacles are cost and long-term reliability of fuel cells. C urrent hydrogen fuel cells use platinum as a catalyst; consequently, they are currently too costly for mass-market use .
Satyapal is spearheading the U.S. government's applied hydrogen storage efforts to solve many of those problems. As the team leader for hydrogen storage at the Department of Energy, where she oversees the National Hydrogen Storage Project, she sets strategies and goals, manages research activities to develop new technologies, heads funding initiatives for various academic and industrial players, and evaluates their results.
Barriers to Success
Hydrogen fuel cells offer the prospect of nonpolluting power that doesn't need to be imported. But as Satyapal notes, the issue is not whether the technology works, but how to make it practical—finding a way to produce and deliver hydrogen to make it attractive, in terms of both price and performance, to car buyers.
"One of t he biggest challenges for any of these environmentally beneficial technologies is to make sure that they also compete very favorably with other current technologies," Satyapal says. "That means ensuring that hydrogen vehicles are competitive with gasoline vehicles and get the market penetration and consumer acceptance that we need."
DOE and the automobile and energy industries have collaborated to demonstrate hydrogen vehicles under real-world conditions, and they are operating and testing vehicles and hydrogen refueling stations across the country. There are roughly more than 100 hydrogen vehicles and about 60 operational hydrogen-refueling stations nationwide. But for the industry-government partnership to meet its goal of getting cars into showrooms by 2020, significant investment in infrastructure will be needed to ensure there are enough refueling stations to make the technology viable. In the meantime, Honda will soon begin leasing hydrogen vehicles, and General Motors recently announced 100 hydrogen Equinoxes for customers to test-drive.
"Technically there's been a lot of progress," Satyapal says. "In my specific area, it's very difficult to store hydrogen and meet the performance requirements for vehicles, and we've developed technical targets to shoot for in partnership with industry. A number of completely new materials have been developed that are beginning to show promise for storing hydrogen. It is cutting-edge, applied science, which makes it exciting."
Varied Career Experience
Satyapal's career has combined experience in both academia and industry. After earning a Ph.D. at Columbia University, she taught chemistry at Vassar College and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in applied and engineering physics at Cornell University, where she studied the combustion of chemical warfare agents as part of a U.S. Army-funded project to understand better how to destroy outdated chemical weapons stockpiles.
Satyapal joined United Technologies Corporation, the parent company of such firms as Carrier, Pratt & Whitney, and Sikorsky. Working for UTC's central research facility, she helped develop a way to remove carbon dioxide from spacesuit cartridges so that astronauts could stay in space longer, and worked on technology to dispose of refrigerants, among a number of projects. In the process, she was awarded several patents before being recruited into management, where she headed up labs and teams of scientists, engineers, and technicians.
"After eight years at UTC, I thought I would have much more of a strategic impact by working with many companies and universities, and leverage that talent across the nation to help set a strategic direction, guide the research, and determine where we should invest our funding and accelerate progress ," Satyapal says. "That's why I accepted the position here at DOE."
Making a Difference
There are many reasons to wish for Satyapal's success. More than two thirds of the oil used in the United States goes toward transportation, so finding an alternative fuel for cars and trucks would drastically reduce dependence on foreign energy sources. From an environmental perspective, scientific evidence strongly suggests that carbon dioxide emissions are having a deleterious environmental effect. And no one enjoys paying $3 or more a gallon to gas up.
"The rule of thumb is that one gallon of gasoline has about the same energy as one kilogram of hydrogen, but since a fuel cell vehicle is twice as efficient, you only need half as much hydrogen," Satyapal says. "It has the highest energy density of all known fuels by weight, but the situation is reversed in terms of volume. That is why hydrogen storage is so important. We're making a lot of technical progress, and it's all very exciting."
Tom Durso writes about science, health care, and business for a variety of publications, including the Philadelphia Business Journal and Family Business magazine.