Gold Innovations Blog

It would still take a brave man to predict if and when fuel cells will enter mainstream production as an automotive power source. The remaining barriers and issues are many, and are complicated by ‘external’ influences like the price of oil. Putting that aside, if they do enter high volume production PEM fuel cells offer a potential new source of demand for gold, in a number of different fuel cell applications – as previously highlighted here. One specific fuel cell component where gold already is a material (coating) of choice is for separator plate coatings in automotive PEM fuel cells as described in this recent paper. As the author points out:

……in the aggressive fuel cell environment, corrosion of metal plates can significantly effect fuel cell performance while passivation can also lead to increased ohmic losses. The only metal plate material studied in the literature which meets the performance targets for contact resistance and corrosion is gold coated stainless steel.

As engineers focus on cost reduction it will be interesting to see if gold remains the optimum material here…