Surpassing Platinum in ‘reducing’ oxygen using zirconium nitride

Pt, a metal costlier than gold is used in fuel cells, is used to convert chemical energy to electrical energy.  This cost is a bottleneck; so is the fact that it can lose its catalytic efficiency rather quickly. Here we showed that a material called zirconium nitride can go beyond platinum in terms of performance, and hence opens up possibilities for accelerating the large scale use of fuel cells.

Ref: Nature Materials volume 19, pages282–286 (2020).

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-019-0535-9