Ceres Power 40 Percent Increase In Power Output
Ceres Power announces that early test results show an increase of greater than 40 percent in the overall power density of their steel cell technology, through a variety of material and mechanical improvements to cell and stack design. This milestone has been achieved against the company's internal roadmap and further validates the route to affordable fuel cell products. Ceres expects these improvements to be brought forward from R&D to customer programmes later this year, resulting in lower product costs and accelerating the adoption of end user products using the technology.
The unique Steel Cell technology is a low cost, next generation fuel cell technology and Ceres is working with leading power systems companies to develop and commercialise power products using the technology.
Considerable technical progress has been made in the past 6 months and all of the key technical performance milestones have been met, with an increase of net electrical efficiency to 47 percent. This is equivalent to the highest performance achieved for SOFC in the Japanese market and superior to existing offerings from PEM technology providers.
The target for the next period is to demonstrate that the Steel Cell technology enables net efficiency exceeding 50 percent. This would enhance the already significant benefit to the residential consumer in terms of economic payback and widens the potential of the technology to other markets such as prime and back-up power applications for businesses.
Mark Selby, Chief Technology Officer, stated: "The impact of this performance improvement is a potentially a 40 percent reduction in stack cost and in the region of a 20 percent reduction in overall system cost. We have a number of exciting technology development programmes, like this one, that will translate into a sustained competitive advantage."
