The SteelCell technology from Ceres Power was named the UK’s top engineering innovation at last night’s (13 July) MacRobert Award ceremony at the Royal Academy of Engineering Awards Dinner at the Londoner Hotel, Leicester Square. Princess Anne, the academy’s royal fellow, presented the team behind the technology with the MacRobert Award gold medal and a £50,000 prize.
The company’s “ground-breaking fuel cell technology… promises to make a major contribution to decarbonising the world at the scale and pace required to save the planet,” an award announcement said.
The cell stacks, similar to large batteries, are made of thin perforated steel sheets, onto which a gadolinium-doped ceria ceramic membrane has been printed. A 5kW stack has 187 layers of this electrolyte.
In fuel cell mode, a gas – either hydrogen, a hydrogen carrier such as ammonia, or natural gas – is fed over the sheets. Hydrogen ions meet oxygen ions coming in from the cathode side, creating water and releasing electrons.
In electrolyser mode, the opposite happens – the cell is fed with electrons from renewable energy and steam, which separates into oxygen and green hydrogen.
The judging panel was impressed with the cell’s use of common low-cost materials, combined with an “innovative deposition technique and a highly differentiated stack technology”. One cell is enough to light a room, while the 250MW of capacity set to start operating in 2024 could power half a million homes.
The judges were also impressed by the “truly reversible” nature of the technology, calling it a “huge breakthrough in the clean energy revolution”. While the cells are reversible, one unit would normally be expected to operate as either fuel cell or electrolyser, as the two applications require different supporting infrastructure.
The cells operate in a ‘Golidlocks’ temperature range of 500-600ºC, maximising performance, fuel flexibility, cost and robustness. The developer, which uses a licensing model, has established partnerships with companies such as Bosch, Doosan, and Weichai, who will build cells for power generation, transportation, industry, and everyday life.
“The innovation promises to be a huge game-changer for hydrogen generation and marks a significant breakthrough in clean energy technology, providing the tools for companies to reach net zero, even in the most hard-to-abate sectors,” said Professor Sir Richard Friend FREng FRS, chair of the judging panel.
“The engineering heroes behind the UK's world-changing engineering innovations deserve to be celebrated. Ceres’ spectacular work continues the UK’s proud tradition of world-leading engineering innovation, and highlights the important contribution the UK can make in tackling the ongoing climate crisis.”
Ceres joins an illustrious list of previous MacRobert Award winners, including the teams behind the CT scanner, the first television graphics system, and the Raspberry Pi mini-computer. The 2022 winner, Quanta Dialysis Technologies, made portable, high-performance dialysis a reality.
“We are thrilled to gain the recognition of the Royal Academy of Engineering as the winner of the 2023 MacRobert Award,” said Dr Caroline Hargrove CBE FREng, chief technology officer at Ceres. “The UK is a science and technology powerhouse – as a nation, we have invented some of the world’s best technology that we see all around us today. At Ceres, we believe the same can be true of hydrogen and fuel cell technology.
“We have an incredibly talented team of nearly 500 scientists and engineers, pioneering electrochemical technologies that are enabling the world’s most progressive companies to deliver clean energy at scale and pace. And we need to succeed, to ensure that we can deliver a net zero future for our families, for society and for all our benefit.”
The other 2023 finalists were nPlan, which developed an AI tool that forecasts how long every element of a construction project will take, and Paragraf, which created energy efficient graphene sensors.
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