{"id":221937,"date":"2025-09-16T03:23:01","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T08:23:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/atomic-ct-scan-reveals-how-gallium-boosts-fuel-cell-catalyst-durability"},"modified":"2025-09-16T03:23:01","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T08:23:01","slug":"atomic-ct-scan-reveals-how-gallium-boosts-fuel-cell-catalyst-durability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/atomic-ct-scan-reveals-how-gallium-boosts-fuel-cell-catalyst-durability","title":{"rendered":"Atomic \u2018CT scan\u2019 reveals how gallium boosts fuel cell catalyst durability"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/atomic-ct-scan-reveals-how-gallium-boosts-fuel-cell-catalyst-durability.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have long been hailed as the future of clean mobility: cars that emit nothing but water while delivering high efficiency and power density. Yet a stubborn obstacle remains. The heart of the fuel cell, the platinum-based catalyst, is both expensive and prone to degradation. Over time, the catalyst deteriorates during operation, forcing frequent replacements and keeping hydrogen vehicles costly.<\/p>\n<p>Understanding why and how these catalysts degrade at the atomic level is a longstanding challenge in catalysis research. Without this knowledge, designing truly durable and affordable fuel cells for mass adoption remains out of reach.<\/p>\n<p>Now, a team led by Professor Yongsoo Yang of the Department of Physics at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), in collaboration with Professor Eun-Ae Cho of KAIST\u2019s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, researchers at Stanford University and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has successfully tracked the three-dimensional change of individual atoms inside fuel cell catalysts during thousands of operating cycles. The results provide unprecedented insight into the atomic-scale degradation mechanisms of platinum-nickel (PtNi) catalysts, and demonstrate how gallium (Ga) doping dramatically improves both their performance and durability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have long been hailed as the future of clean mobility: cars that emit nothing but water while delivering high efficiency and power density. Yet a stubborn obstacle remains. The heart of the fuel cell, the platinum-based catalyst, is both expensive and prone to degradation. Over time, the catalyst deteriorates during operation, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221937\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}