The British firm revolutionising hydrogen fuel cell production

Hydrogen versus battery power for cars is a debate that polarises opinion. But the potential use of hydrogen in fuel cell systems goes way beyond passenger vehicles. Bramble Energy was founded in 2016 as a spin-off from work at University College London and Imperial College by Tom Mason, Dan Brett and Anthony Kucernak. The three scientists are co-inventors of a revolutionary method of making fuel cells called Printed Circuit Board Fuel Cell (PCBFC), which cuts the time of making a bespoke fuel cell system from 14 -16 months to 10 -30 days. The breakthrough came during Mason’s PhD project. “The core concept behind it was to look at what exactly was the barrier to scaling up fuel cells and why they’re so expensive,” he explains. Conventional wisdom blamed the cost on rare materials like platinum, but Mason points out there’s no more in a fuel cell than there is in a combustion car’s catalytic converter. The real problem, he found, lay in relatively cumberstone methods of manufacturing cells that had persisted for decades. In a similar way to an electric car battery, fuel cell stacks (think engines) are made up of hundreds of individual cells. Each of these cells consists of a membrane electrode assembly sandwiched by two plates that allow air to flow through on one side and hydrogen on the other. Those end plates, traditionally made of carbon fiber or metal sheet, are relatively complex to make, and given that there might be around 400 cells with 800 plates in each fuel cell stack, it’s time-consuming. Mason and Brett came up with the idea of using a component already made cheaply and in the millions for all electronic products, the printed circuit board (PCB), to make end plates at mass-production speeds. “We realised that the best thing to do was use an existing supply chain, and that ’s what led us down the printed circuit board route,” says Mason. The PCB, which is made of fibreglass and polymer (plastic), contains the channels for air and hydrogen and can be ordered from existing suppliers and manufactured very quickly. “PCBs are standardised globally. It's a very large, £64 billion industry with plenty of capacity,” says Mason. The membrane assembly is likewise mature technology that ’is readily available from suppliers. Mason says taking this approach is what distinguishes Bramble from most of the fuel cell business. “A lot of the industry relies on building factories to make their products. We don’t,” he says. “All of the manufacturing is outsourced.” Bramble works with customers to design the type of fuel cell system they want, the customer licences it and then takes care of the manufacturing directly. What can hydrogen fuel cell systems be used to power? “Anything that moves,” is Mason’s answer. Bramble’s customers are global and cover a wide range of applications, from cars to trucks, railway locomotives to stationary generators. “We’ve got a long list of customers we’re starting to work with now and we’re only a young company,” says Mason. “We’ve grown from three people to 80 in less than three years, so it ’s moving really quickly.” Mason is at pains to point out that he’s “very clearly not anti-battery ” and that “there’s the opportunity to hybridise the two technologies. The holy grail of any system using hydrogen is that the hydrogen only provides the energy and the power comes from a battery.” Many customers are replacing diesel engines in their applications, and Mason sees huge potential in trucks particularly, because “if you want to move something heavy over long distances, then hydrogen is probably the best choice”. And the use of hydrogen for heavier transport may well result in fuel cells being adopted on a wider scale, because “once you put in an infrastructure to support things that are undeniably suited to the use of hydrogen, you have to ask why you wouldn’t use it for other things”. That could eventually lead to the era of the hydrogen car that has remained elusive for so long.