The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded Cornell University $2.25 million over three years to establish the Cornell Fuel Cell Institute (CFCI). The institute will research new materials to kick-start the development of fuel cells that would be both efficient and cheap to produce.

Héctor Abruña, center, director of the newly established Cornell Fuel Cell Institute, works with graduate student Emerilis Casado Rivera. The new institute could involve many of the 100 faculty members in materials research at Cornell.

The new approach to the electrochemical device, that in its traditional form converts hydrogen and oxygen into water and produces electricity and heat in the process, aims to make a significant improvement in the technology by discovering and exploiting new materials based on recent discoveries in Cornell laboratories. Indeed, some of the possible fuel cell technologies that could result from the research might not even involve hydrogen as a fuel.

“This is an interdisciplinary approach to good science with an obvious technological import,” says Cornell’s Francis (Frank) DiSalvo, co-principal investigator with Héctor Abruña, both professors of chemistry and chemical biology. “It is not often you can see such a close link between the basic research and a potential payoff.” DiSalvo is director of the National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded Cornell Center for Materials Research, which manages a group of shared experimental facilities that will provide many of the analytical tools for the fuel cell research.

Some of the research also will take place in two other NSF-funded centers, the Cornell Nanoscale Facility and the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source.

Although the CFCI initially will involve just six Cornell researchers and one from the California Institute of Technology, ultimately it could call on the expertise of many of the 100 faculty members involved in materials research at Cornell. The DOE funds primarily will support graduate and postdoctoral research.

—David Brand, Cornell News Service