Pajarito Powder, LLC (PPC), manufacturer of advanced Engineered Carbon Supports and catalysts Fuel Cells, has entered into a licensing arrangement with Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos) to transfer, evaluate and commercialize the world’s leading precious-metal-free fuel cell catalysts developed by Piotr Zelenay and Hoon Taek Chung of Materials Synthesis and Integrated Devices at Los Alamos. “This licensing arrangement with Los Alamos nicely enhances Pajarito Powder’s intellectual property with regard to platinum-free catalyst development, our core focus”, said Thomas J. Stephenson, PPC’s CEO and Chairman. Platinum has historically represented a high-cost component of fuel cell technology, thereby preventing wide-scale adoption. Incremental improvements in the activity and durability of platinum-free engineered carbon supports are contributing to the global maturation of the industry, and promoting development of manufacturing capacity in the United States. “These patents lay the groundwork for future development of platinum-free catalysts,” stated Zelenay who is a Los Alamos fellow and contributor to the patent work. Zelenay has been at the forefront of developing precious-metal-free fuel cell catalyst. His original work is published in the scholarly magazine Science, “High-Performance Electrocatalysts for Oxygen Reduction Derived from Polyaniline, Iron, and Cobalt”. Please review the original publication, here.
