The Porous Transport Electrode Breakthrough

Smoltek Hydrogen’s break­through in reduc­ing irid­i­um usage cen­ters on our PTE tech­nol­o­gy. Instead of apply­ing cat­a­lyst to the mem­brane (CCM approach), we coat the elec­trode sub­strate (CCS approach) with a cru­cial inno­va­tion: mul­ti­ply­ing the avail­able sur­face area.

By grow­ing ver­ti­cal­ly aligned car­bon nanofibers direct­ly onto a porous tita­ni­um lay­er, we cre­ate a for­est-like struc­ture that increas­es the active sur­face area 30-fold. These nanofibers, 14,000 times thin­ner than a human hair, trans­form a stan­dard A4-sized elec­trode into an effec­tive cat­alyt­ic sur­face exceed­ing 1.8 mil­lion mm².

Our man­u­fac­tur­ing process is straightforward:

1. Car­bon nanofibers are grown on tita­ni­um substrate
2. An ultra-thin plat­inum coat­ing pro­tects against cor­ro­sion while main­tain­ing conductivity
3. Irid­i­um is pre­cise­ly deposit­ed atom-by-atom, cre­at­ing max­i­mum active cat­a­lyst sites
4. The com­plet­ed PTE is qual­i­ty test­ed and pack­aged for deliv­ery to elec­trolyz­er manufacturers

Performance Validation

Our tech­nol­o­gy deliv­ers proven results, which con­firm that we have achieved TRL 4 (val­i­dat­ed in a lab­o­ra­to­ry environment):

• Iden­ti­cal per­for­mance: We achieve the same per­for­mance with only 0.1 mg/​cm² irid­i­um com­pared to con­ven­tion­al elec­trodes requir­ing 2.0 mg/​cm².
• Proven dura­bil­i­ty: Suc­cess­ful 1,000-hour tests com­plet­ed with­out signs of irre­versible degradation.
• Inde­pen­dent ver­i­fi­ca­tion: PEM expert Dr. Felix Büchi has inde­pen­dent­ly ver­i­fied and con­firmed our technology’s capabilities.

We are cur­rent­ly per­form­ing tests under indus­tri­al­ly rel­e­vant con­di­tions to val­i­date TRL 5, a step we expect to reach short­ly. There­after, our pro­duc­tion capa­bil­i­ties, start­ing in 2026, will accel­er­ate fur­ther devel­op­ment towards TRL 6–7.

Intellectual Property & Business Model

Our tech­nol­o­gy is under­pinned by a com­pre­hen­sive intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty port­fo­lio com­pris­ing over 110 patents grant­ed or pend­ing across 22 patent fam­i­lies. This pro­tec­tion cov­ers core CNF syn­the­sis, elec­trode struc­ture design, and man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es, cre­at­ing a sig­nif­i­cant bar­ri­er to entry with strate­gic cov­er­age in key mar­kets includ­ing Europe (EPO), USA, Chi­na, Tai­wan, South Korea, Japan, and India, among others.

Our busi­ness mod­el focus­es on man­u­fac­tur­ing and sell­ing the com­plete Smoltek PTE to our cus­tomers, enabling them to achieve near­ly 100% cat­a­lyst uti­liza­tion, with each irid­i­um atom active­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing in the reactions.

The same plat­form tech­nol­o­gy can rev­o­lu­tion­ize fuel cells and oth­er elec­tro­chem­i­cal appli­ca­tions, posi­tion­ing Smoltek as a fun­da­men­tal enabler of the hydro­gen economy.