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„The stone age did not end for lack of stone...”

- Sheikh Zaki Yamani
(former Saudi Oil Minister)

Nowadays, electrical energy is the cleanest and most versatile energy that can be used in almost all fields of life. Due to the technical improvements, the utilization and the efficiency of producing electrical energy are increasingly growing. However, this technical advancement has caused huge destruction in the environment and a drastic decrease in the energy sources towards the sustenance of comfort.

One of the greatest challenges of the 21st century is not just to produce the required energy, but to transfer it to the consumers. As a matter of fact, the required energy can be produced in different power plants. The main problem is the storage and the transfer of the produced energy. As there is no way to lay wires and pipes everywhere, the energy must be "packed in".  One of the alternatives is to "close" the energy in chemical compounds, and to liberate it at the consumers. Currently two versions of this method are known:

• Burning fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, etc.), which is not environmentally sound and not renewable
• Applying fuel cells, which is environmentally sound and partly renewable, hence the required fuel can be mass produced artificially (hydrogen, methanol, etc.)

With the help of fuel cells, environmentally sound energy can be obtained by electrochemical “burning” of the compounds (mostly organic hydride compounds, or pure hydrogen) in the right time.  The technology itself is not new. The first fuel cell was made by Sir William Robert Grove in 1839. However, the technology was stable in the industrial practice, its performance was quite low. Since then many scientists have been working on increasing the performance of fuel cells, but to this day nobody was able to build a fuel cell with the efficiency of an Otto engine.

Fuel cells are galvanic batteries that are able to convert the chemical energy of the fuel directly to electrical energy. However, one of the biggest differences between fuel cells and galvanic batteries is the fact that while the galvanic batteries need changing or charging, the fuel cells can operate constantly by reloading its fuel continuously.
Our research group, named FuelCell.hu, is a proton exchange membrane fuel cell  (PEMFC) control technology development center, which aims to develop cost-effective technical processes for the industry by merging the electrochemical, mathematical and IT knowledge.