Smoltek Hydro­gen has suc­cess­ful­ly refur­bished the in-house devel­oped pro­pri­etary PECVD R&D tool, from its 6‑inch diam­e­ter area, to be com­pat­i­ble with A4 size. This cor­re­sponds to an expan­sion of area by more than 3 times, and sta­ble plas­ma cov­er­ing the entire A4 area has been achieved.

By expand­ing our capa­bil­i­ties in the R&D tool we gain use­ful knowl­edge that will pre­pare and speed up the trans­fer of the growth recipes from lab­o­ra­to­ry tech­nol­o­gy in the R&D tool to indus­tri­al tech­nol­o­gy in the Pro­to­type Coater* , why achiev­ing A4 size plas­ma is an impor­tant step­ping stone towards a scal­able indus­tri­al process.

Shafiq Kabir, Head of Vol­ume Process­es at Smoltek Hydrogen

Cur­rent­ly Smoltek’s PTE cell mate­r­i­al pro­to­types are man­u­fac­tured with lab­o­ra­to­ry tech­nolo­gies, and the car­bon nanofibers are grown using the R&D PECVD tool which up until now has been capa­ble of coat­ing up to approx­i­mate­ly 6‑inch diam­e­ter area. Elec­trolyz­er cells and their con­stituent mate­ri­als are often rec­tan­gu­lar or square shaped and elec­trol­y­sis test sys­tems are typ­i­cal­ly designed for square shaped pro­to­types, so is the test sys­tem used by Smoltek Hydro­gen, why it is more suit­able to adapt the tools for rec­tan­gu­lar or square shaped instead of round ones. A larg­er rec­tan­gu­lar shape also pro­vides high­er flex­i­bil­i­ty by being able to pro­duce both sin­gle large pro­to­type or a high­er quan­ti­ty of mul­ti­ple small ones dur­ing a sin­gle run, which in turn enables faster devel­op­ment and increased capac­i­ty to pro­vide pro­to­types to cus­tomers based on their size needs. 

Plas­ma – fun­da­men­tal for car­bon nanofiber growth
Plas­ma is one of the four fun­da­men­tal states of mat­ter, along­side sol­id, liq­uid, and gas, and it is char­ac­ter­ized by the elec­trons being sep­a­rat­ed from their par­ent atoms or mol­e­cules, which sim­pli­fied means that plas­ma is a cloud of elec­trons and a source of extra ener­gy in the sys­tem. Plas­ma has unique prop­er­ties and achiev­ing a sta­ble plas­ma is essen­tial for Smoltek’s process of car­bon nanofiber growth on the porous trans­port lay­er (PTL) for its elec­trolyz­er cell material. 

The suc­cess­ful rebuild of the in-house PECVD R&D tool to A4 size plas­ma is an ini­tial result at one of our growth recipes, and the focus now is to fur­ther improve and fine-tune the hard­ware and recipe, and val­i­da­tion by grow­ing nanofibers on PTLs.

Shafiq Kabir, Head of Vol­ume Process­es at Smoltek Hydrogen

* Smoltek Hydro­gen has final­ized design of a pro­to­type coater

Fact box: Smoltek Hydrogen’s PTE cell mate­r­i­al:
Smoltek Hydro­gen is devel­op­ing a nanofiber based porous trans­port elec­trode (PTE) cell mate­r­i­al for the anode in PEM elec­trolyz­ers. The cell mate­r­i­al con­sists of a sin­tered porous tita­ni­um lay­er (PTL) where the sur­face area has been enhanced with ver­ti­cal nanofibers, a con­for­mal plat­inum cor­ro­sion pro­tec­tion and ultra-thin nanopar­ti­cle lay­er of irid­i­um cat­a­lyst. The mate­r­i­al is one of the lay­ers in an elec­trolyz­er cell. When man­u­fac­tur­ing elec­trolyz­ers, a large num­ber of elec­trolyz­er cells are assem­bled into a cell stack, which is the main ele­ment in the elec­trolyz­er as it is where the elec­trol­y­sis takes place and hydro­gen is produced.