Eric Parker, Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Technologies Office:
Hello everyone. And welcome to another H2IQ Hour, our monthly educational webinar series that helps highlight research and development activities funded by the US Department of Energy’s hydrogen and fuel cell technologies office or HFTO within the office of energy efficiency and renewable energy or EERE. If you’re active on social media we encourage you to share anything interesting, surprising, or informative that you get from this H2IQ Hour by using the H2IQ hashtag in your posts. And as well we’ll always be announcing more interesting topics.
So as you heard this call is being recorded and will be posted to the DOE’s website and used internally. All attendees will be on mute throughout the webinar so please submit questions via the Q&A box you should see in the bottom right of your WebEx panel. We’ll be using that for the Q&A portion at the end of today’s webinar. And with that I’m going to turn it over to our DOE host Vanessa Arjona to introduce today’s very important topic and some background on the DOE’s work. Thanks Vanessa.
Vanessa Arjona, Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Technologies Office:
Thank you Eric. And thanks everyone for joining us today. Can everybody hear me? Ok. So as Eric mentioned my name is Vanessa Arjona. I’m the communications lead for the DOE’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office or HFTO as you will see it referred to in the next slide. We were known as FCTO or Fuel Cells Technologies Office but we official put hydrogen back into the office name as it had been in the past. The topic we’re addressing today is very interesting and relevant to what we’ve been seeing in the last two to three months with the COVID-19 pandemic and the need from institutions and hospitals to have the protective equipment and resources to respond to this crisis.
We’re going to hear specifically from four organizations that are leveraging hydrogen and fuel cell technology and facilities to make a difference in these times of emergency. And these are just a few examples and it goes to show how some of the most difficult times can really bring the best out of individuals and companies and push them to innovate and work together for the common good. But before we dive into these four examples, I’d like to provide a short introduction about how some of the work our office has funded in hydrogen and fuel cells R&D has helped pave the way for innovative technologies, facilities and equipment that are now being leveraged for the greater good during these challenging times.
Our office focuses on three key areas. For fuel cell research priorities including reducing cost and improving durability of components or materials like catalyst and membrane. In hydrogen R&D our focus is reducing cost and developing hydrogen production technologies that make use of diverse domestic resources as well as enabling advances on hydrogen infrastructure and hydrogen storage. And in technology acceleration we include grid integration, suspense, and demonstration activities.
Most of our work directly supports one of our flagship initiatives called H2@Scale which envisions affordable large scale hydrogen production, storage, distribution and utilization across multiple sectors and industries in the economy including energy storage, heavy duty transportation, metals manufacturing and many others including those that you see on the right side of the H2@Scale graphic on the slide. We have a lot of work going in this area including a recent funding opportunity for $64 million. And we’re currently evaluating applications that will fuel the next round of H2@Scale projects in our portfolio. And while hydrogen and fuel cells have come a long way thanks to the work of many of you joining us today, we have a lot of work left to do and need to continue the close collaboration and coordination with national laboratories, industry partners, states, international stakeholders, and other key members of the hydrogen fuel cell community. So for us, collaboration with all of our stakeholders is key to get the technology where it needs to be.
So how has the R&D that we funded translated into real world technology? Our office at DOE has helped fuel the innovation and breakthroughs that have opened the doors for many hydrogen and fuel cell technology applications in the market. Some examples include nearly a thousand hydrogen and fuel cell patents issued as a result of our funding. The work we’ve supported has enabled over 30 technologies commercialized by the private sector with full on private investment as well as over 65 technologies with the potential to be commercialized in the next few years. And these are just some examples of the technologies that have been enabled through DOE support. They range from material such as catalyst and support for fuel cells to enabling complete systems such as fuel cell forklifts, hydrogen technologies like tanks and tube trailers as well as electrolyzers like the one of our speakers at _____ will refer to in future slides during the webinar.
Finally before we get to the speakers today who will cover specific examples relevant to COVID-19 I would like to recognize other organizations who have been, who have really made an impact during this crisis. I would like to acknowledge the institutions listed on this and next slide with whom we’ve worked with in some capacity in the past for stepping up during these difficult times to help either by donating masks and PPE equipment, leveraging their facilities to produce equipment for hospitals including respirators, making the resources available to the research community to find ways to mitigate the virus, supporting the community in various ways to make sure essential services or facilities like supermarkets keep working around the clock and also for helping so that local hospitals have appropriate equipment to better respond to this emergency. And here I would like to also thank the fuel cells and hydrogen energy trade association for their efforts in compiling and publicizing examples of how companies are supporting COVID-19 response.
And with that I’d like to welcome our speakers from Air Company, NEL Hydrogen, eSpin Technologies, Giner and Stanford University. Thank you for joining us today. Our first speakers are Dr. Kathy Ayers, vice president of research and development at NEL Hydrogen and Dr. Stafford Sheehan, chief technology officer at Air Company. They will talk about how they are leveraging renewable hydrogen production technologies to produce ethanol to then produce hand sanitizers for hospitals in the New York City area. Kathy, Staff, thanks for being with us today and the floor is yours.
Kathy Ayers, NEL Hydrogen:
Ok. Thank you Vanessa. So I’m just going to give a very brief overview of the hydrogen side of things and then Staff will talk about how they’re integrating that technology into their own process as Vanessa said to make ethanol. So this is a picture on the front of one of our two megawatt systems, hydrogen generation systems that is sited in California for fueling buses. It produces almost a ton of hydrogen a day so just to give some context. If you go to the next slide.
I just wanted to point out here that NEL has been around for a long time and electrolysis has been advancing for a long time. So the technology that we’re talking about today is the proton exchange membrane based systems which have really been around since the ‘50s, proton on side at the time proton energy systems was founded in 1996 and has been steadily scaling up those systems and reducing the cost with the help of DOE funded projects to the point that we’re at now. So we currently produce these systems that I mentioned are up to close to a ton of hydrogen a day which is about two orders of magnitude larger than the system at the Air Company but shows kind of where these technologies can go. At the same time we have a long history in the alkaline side as well. We were acquired by NEL Hydrogen which has a 90 year history dating back to _____ days. So we have electrolyzers installed all over the world for multiple types of applications which I show on the next slide.
So currently hydrogen produced from proton membrane electrolysis is still in the process of being cost reduced. That’s largely because when it was developed it was originally used for life support, not for the hydrogen side of things. And so as we’ve grown and been able to commercialize it for hydrogen production we’ve been able to decrease the cost and improve the efficiency which I’ll talk about on the next slide. But hydrogen is used for all these different industries which I think feeds well into what Staff’s going to talk about. These industries over here represent kind of traditional hydrogen markets which is a very large amount of gas used for all of these.
Ethanol is just one chemical that’s made from hydrogen. So making that process renewable is very important. We also are now getting into more of these renewable applications as I mentioned fueling, energy storage and other types of means of using hydrogen for other applications to help decarbonize. So if you go onto the next slide which is my last one and then I’ll turn it over to Staff. I just wanted to point out one example. If we can go to the next slide. I’m still seeing the hydrogen from proton membrane electrolysis slide.
There we go. So one example of how our relationship with DOE and the help that they’ve given to this industry has really resulted in advancements, we’ve really worked with them on multiple projects on the materials and manufacturing side. A key one being the bipolar plate program that we had a few years ago. And the work that they’ve funded is really more on the fundamental side looking at modeling different components, prototyping, different methods of making components such as bipolar plates and membrane electrode assemblies, fundamental studies of embrittlement and different stabilities of coatings and then also translating that to how to scale. And this is a picture of the _____ equipment at NREL for making some components.
So one of the main projects that we had a few years ago was to look at our bipolar plate, optimize the manufacturing process, optimize the coating, and then scale it up. And we have done that going from a 90 square centimeter platform up to 680 which forms the big 50 kilowatt stack. And we’ve now scaled that further with our own funding up to an even megawatt stack based, all based on this same basic science that was developed through this project. So again I just wanted to give this very brief overview of where hydrogen has come and how large in scale it’s getting being produced by electrolysis which gives us an avenue for renewables. And then I will turn it over to Staff to talk about specifically how they’re using their system in their processes.
Stafford Sheehan, Air Co.:
All right. I think my slides up next. My name is Stafford Sheehan, chief technology officer of Air Co. We’ve been around for a lot shorter period of time than NEL has. We’re a startup company based in New York City. If you want to just go to the next slide. I’m just going to walk through these fairly quick. We’re the world’s first carbon negative alcohol company. You can keep going. We’re taking the world’s alcohol industry that’s currently not environmentally friendly and we’re innovating in it. Keep going to the next one. There might be a little bit of a time lag there.
So we’re trying to make the highest quality most sustainable products that help rather than hurt our planet using renewably derived alcohols. Go on to the next slide please. Our overall goal of our company and our technology is to take carbon dioxide that we either capture from a point source or the air and renewable hydrogen that’s made from an electrolyzer that’s currently provided by NEL. And combine them and we use a heterogeneous catalysis to combine the hydrogen and carbon dioxide at a slightly elevated temperature and pressure to produce ethanol. For more detailed diagram of our process you can go on to the next slide. There’s a little bit of a time lag.
For a more detailed diagram of the process what we’re doing is carbon dioxide hydrogenation in a flow reactor. And what comes out of that is gaseous phase mixed alcohol, water which we then condense out, separate, and distill. One of the advantages of our technology is that we can power the entire thing using solar photovoltaics because everything is electrically powered all the way down to our distillation systems which we use electric steam for. So the product ethanol that we get, it’s cost is measured in kilowatt hours more so than anything else. Continue on to the next slide please.
As an application of renewable hydrogen our major innovation in the Our Tech box that you saw on the previous slide is that carbon dioxide conversion reactor that we build together with the separation systems that are downstream from that. I don’t know if I’m still stuck on a previous slide if you can go on to the next one. So the facility that we have – the slides still aren’t moving forward for me but I’m just going to keep talking. The facility that we have in Brooklyn, New York is a 2,500 square foot facility and hopefully you guys got a chance to see it in the slide right before there, 2,500 square foot facility that features an 18 foot tall reactor that does the actual carbon dioxide hydrogenation and a NEL electrolyzer that provides renewable hydrogen for us.
And the product that we make is – well, the product that we used to make was Air Co Vodka. It was an ultra premium vodka. We won in blind taste tests. We won gold medals in two international spirits competitions. But when COVID-19 broke out and was particularly bad in New York City we found that there was a bigger need for something else that was ethanol based rather than vodka. And we ended up pivoting our technology to producer sanitizer. So the sanitizer is produced from the FDA and World Health Organization guidelines as 80 percent ethanol by volume with other stuff in there to make sure people don’t drink it. You can keep going down a couple slides. We bounced around a little bit. I’m just going to keep going on the sanitizer front there.
If you can move on to the slide that has the sanitizer I’ll, I can give you guys a peek of it because we haven’t for the most part been selling it. We’ve been donating it to the local hospitals and organizations in New York City. For example Mount Sinai Hospital. We gave away a lot to the New York Police Department. And we got covered from a few, by a few media sources that you can see here. The sanitizer has the same ethanol that we use for vodka production which is the carbon negative ethanol. It’s ultra-high purity meets and it actually exceeds USP standards. And we’ve been donating that for the most part within New York City.
So here’s kind of the slide that you can see the organizations that we’ve been donating to and we’re continuing to support many organizations like these. We’re planning to – we’re planning to also sell it because we are a business. As I mentioned we’re a small business in New York City so we still have rent to pay and we still have mouths to feed. So we are gradually rolling out sales of sanitizer as well. And if anybody is interested in purchasing especially looking at B2B please feel free to email me. My email address is right there on the screen. And for company updates please feel free to follow us on Instagram. There’s kind of our most used social platform. And that’s it for me on Air Co sanitizer.
Vanessa Arjona:
Ok. Thanks so much Staff and Kathy for a very interesting presentation. Apologies for the technical difficulties. It seems like we do have a delay with the slides. So we might want to make myself the presenter also have the slides available if that helps. So we’ll not move to eSpin Technologies and we have eSpin Founder Jayesh Doshi with us who will be covering how eSpin is using their expertise in nanofibers originally developed for fuel cell membranes to produce surgical face masks. Welcome Jayesh and please take it away. I’m going to go ahead and share your slides.
Jayesh Doshi, eSpin Technologies:
Thank you Vanessa. Thank you DOE for this opportunity. We are a small business in Chattanooga, Tennessee. We have been in business for 20 years and we have a 65,000 square foot factory. The main business is to produce nanofibers and use nanofibers for downstream products such as air filtration products, wipes, and membranes. Most of our products are currently being sold in automotive, airports and healthcare facilities here in southeast and some of the Midwest areas. Our full competency. Oh producing nanofiber led us to produce downstream products and as it is we acquired a lot of assets which allows us to make downstream products. And this asset became extremely valuable as we entered into COVID crisis to allow us to make products. As I mentioned our key products are air filters and wipes and battery separators, membranes. And we focus on specific chemistries and we also expanded our program specifically for DOE to make ion exchange membranes, bipolar membranes. And as COVID crisis hit – next slide. Someone call slide, sorry.
Vanessa Arjona:
Next slide?
Jayesh Doshi:
Yes. Next one. So as we enter to COVID pandemic in February 2020 we started receiving requests about nanofibers from Asia. And we were finishing up our SBIR phase one with DOE about manufacturing membranes. And when more and more calls starting coming in we started deciding to leverage the work which we have done in the past for SBIRs and have this asset and how to use this asset to meet the demand, create revenue, at the same time help the society. Next slide please.
So we went into a very rapid development of a new product. We started using one of our machines to develop 95 percent efficient nanofiber only filter media which can be used to make face masks as people are inquiring more and more about face mask material. And as the more demand was predicted we started preparing additional machines which were not, which were _____ machines. So we started ok, how can we use this. And also we started running longer hours to produce this material as people were wanting. And we started shipping the material to some of the face mask manufacturers.
Our engineer decided why can’t we make face masks ourselves since we also make air filters. And we had an air filter manufacturing asset. So he started experimenting and as you can see in the pictures, he started pleating the fabrics to make face masks. And we started making face masks at a very small scale. I’m talking about making 26 face masks in an hour so the cost of face masks is very high. So to improve the production we also decided jeez, we are to buy some machinery and we are to make our own investment and take the money out of the company and borrow money. But we decided we are going to take the chance. And it was a high risk proposition but we decided to take the chance and we bought some machinery. And that was the best decision I believe we made. Moving on to the next slide.
So we started increasing our production and we went from running one eight hour shift to ten hour shift to two shifts. And we were starting at 6:00 in the morning and shutting down at 1:00. By the time people clean up the machinery it was like 2:00. And that started going on including Saturday and Sunday. And we got everybody excited because product was being made and it was being shipped and we were helping people. So all that’s good. However, as we started doing this we had to hire more people, train these people very quickly, do their background search. And safety became a critical issue because we were making a lot of polymer chemistry for electro spinning and use of solvent increased. There were a lot of safety related issues started cropping up as we were scaling up manufacturing at a very rapid scale. It’s a very fast _____ kind of thing happened here during that time. Next slide please.
So as we started increasing this production more and more started coming up in the beginning of April. And people, local people came to know we are manufacturing face masks so we started getting calls from city chamber, local organizations as to how can they get these masks, how can they help us, what can they do for us. So it was a two way traffic and people started walking in in front office and they wanted to buy this face mask and our fabric. Sell us something. So the business all of a sudden went into very high speed mode and we started developing various different products. And as you can see more companies were calling us. Can you give us media for thermoform face mask or 3D printed mask. Or hey, we are making cotton masks and can you give us nanofiber to put it in. So those kind of things started really ramping up a thing. And as we started making we also started donating face masks to places like post office, children’s hospital because face masks were not available in local area. Next slide please.
As we moved forward we started also getting calls from big corporations. Of course we started forming relationship with – one of the relationships we worked on was Whirlpool, DOW, Volkswagen to make a HEPA filter for a powered air purifier respirator. And within the next 11 days we developed completely new product line. We developed the media. We developed the filters or to make filters, selection of _____, a development of frames and then getting the filter certified by NIOSH which was done by Whirlpool. This relationship also led us to having us some business from other corporations who were part of this thing. And the other relation – Next slide please.
The other relationship we established was with Volkswagen what our neighbor here in Chattanooga to make a surgical face mask. And this was more so for their internal use and then for dealers, network, and other R&D facilities they have all over the United States to manufacture about 60,000 masks a day. So the investment was made by them. We brought the knowledge of nanofiber filter media and jointly we started developing the whole process. The machine was built in Michigan within like 15 days and we started manufacturing masks. And that relationship turned out to be a long term very valuable relationship. Now we are manufacturing all this material for them.
But also as the people came to know from machinery manufacturer in Michigan also started spreading the word that eSpin is providing media. So we started getting calls from other major corporations and we are now manufacturing media, trying to run our machines all the time. And we are selling the media. At the same time we are using the media for our internal use to make products. We are also working with bank to get capital so we can really build larger lines very quickly and expand the production capacity and manufacturing workforce. But I see this was a very rapid step change for eSpin whereby a lot of little R&D to all of a sudden major manufacturing. So we are very thrilled and excited about the possibility of growing this company to a threefold increase in revenue and be a major player in nanofiber area. Thank you.
Vanessa Arjona:
Ok. Thanks so much Jayesh. We’re now going to be moving to Mr. Monjid Hamdan, VP of engineering at Giner ELX. Mr. Monjid Hamdan will be speaking about how Giner is utilizing 3D printing technology funded in part by DOE to print ventilator parts and materials needed to produce protective masks. Thanks for being with us today Monjid and the floor is yours.
Monjid Hamdan, Giner ELX:
Thank you. First of all let me thank Vanessa and Eric for organizing and inviting us. We’re always excited to speak about the activities at Giner Inc. Let me also thank the other participants. We’re all trying to develop solutions to solve a common problem. Let me give you a short background of our company. Giner Inc was founded in 1973. We specialize in _____ based electrochemical devices and systems. And there are three companies under the Giner Inc umbrella. We have Giner life sciences. We develop medical devices there. Giner Labs a lot of R&D work is conducted there, membranes, catalysts, fuel cells and so on. And Giner ELX and Giner ELX is the company that I’m with. We produce electrolyzer stacks and systems.
Next slide please. So just a short introduction to the problem that we’re trying to solve. And we’ve all heard that hospitals across the country are facing shortages with PPE and ventilators. Giner has stepped up to meet these critical shortages by teaming with local hospitals that have a large overreach. And we are fabricating surgical face masks and ventilator parts using equipment that has been funded through DOE. Some of the questions that we initially asked our self when the COVID pandemic started was where can we help? How fast can we respond? Can we even make a difference here? And if you look at the nursing poll from Nursing Times and that was conducted in early April, the question that was asked to the medical stuff was do you have enough PPE for your shift? And if you look at that figure at the graph there and the red marks are essentially the no to that question they had – they were lacking in face masks, disposable gowns, respirators, and full face visors. So we said if we could fabricate any of those we probably could be making a difference. Next slide please.
So as engineers we always like to understand the problem that we’re trying to solve and we always pull up the stats. And if you look at the map of the United States, this was from John Hopkins on May 15th. You could see that the northeast was going to have a very difficult problem with the COVID pandemic. And even earlier maps you could see that again it was the COVID pandemic was concentrating in the New England states. Even in Massachusetts as of May 21st we had over 90,000 cases and over 6,000 deaths. Now you can see that from the figure below it. The confirmed cases are dropping. And as of yesterday I think there were about 400 new cases. So there’s still a lot of work to be done. And so we said ok. Let’s continue the efforts that we’re doing with the surgical mask fabrication and the ventilated parts fabrication. Next slide please.
So we said the fastest way to help would be to team with institutions that have a large overreach. So we teamed with Mass General Brigham. This is Mass General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. They have a website which they’ve made central for COVID innovation. Within that website they have separate teams. There’s about seven different teams that people will help fabricate components for. It includes the MIT E Vent team which is a team that fabricates ventilators. And we began producing parts of these groups. We selected two groups here, the face shield group and the ventilator group. The reason why we chose those groups ‘cause we looked around the lab and we said ok. What equipment do we have in house that could actually be used to fabricate these components. And we found that we had the 3D printers and the laser cutters, both funded in path through DOE. Next slide please.
So you can see some of the ventilator parts that are being produced with the 3D printer. And that 3D printer was actually purchased under a DOE funded program. The program was the portable senor for detection of micro organisms in groundwater. That equipment was originally used to develop the field deployable monitoring systems but also for deploying prototype cell frames. Those cell frames are actually frames that are used in fuel cell stacks and electrolyzer stacks. Now I don’t have any action pictures here because the engineers were pretty smart and they actually took the 3D printer home and were printing the parts during the day and at night. So they were being very active right there. Next slide please.
So with the fabrication of the face shields there was a lot more action in the lab and I think in part because they couldn’t take that laser cutter home. It was just too heavy. It’s about the size of a washing machine, probably weighs about the same. However, we are fabricating the – we are using the laser cutters to fabricate complete parts for the face shield groups. The capacity that we’re able to put out with these visors or manufacture these visors is about 120 per day or about 1,000 per week. The masks are then donated to Harbor Health and Boston Healthcare for the homeless. And we did provide a website here because we took somewhat of a simple approach. So sometimes the simple solutions can be very effective.
We essentially just went to NIH approved – we downloaded from the NIH website an approved design for the visor, the face shields, purchased the materials and began cutting out the shields and assembling them. And so I do – I really do need to congratulate the engineers because when we were asked for our COVID engineering efforts here, we went to the lab. We didn’t even know that half of the engineers were working on this. So we really need to thank the engineers shown here on the top. It was ____ Kang, Katie Butler right below that on the left. Tatiana Anthony and Dave Marcum. And then right at the bottom is Tatiana Anthony, Benjamin Zakin and Dave Marcum. So congratulations to them. Next slide please.
So for the future activities there was a recent speech given by the governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker. And he still indicated that there is a shortage of PPE. So as Giner is gearing up for the back to work phasing plan we plan to continue fabricating the PPE and the ventilator parts until the demand subsides. Next slide please. I think that’s my last slide. Yeah. there you go. There’s my photo of yours truly right there. The mask is – I’m wearing the mask there so it does look a little scary. However some of the engineers are kind of afraid to approach me but it does make the work day go a little easier without the walk ins I guess. So that face shield can have more than one use. So I’ll leave the – again thank you for listening and I’ll leave the questions for the end of the presentation.
Vanessa Arjona:
Excellent. Thank you so much Monjid. Our final speaker for today’s H2IQ Hour is Dr. Fritz Prinz and John Xu at Stanford University. They will walk us through how they’re utilizing R&D insights on optimizing oxygen concentrations for _____ operation, to reengineer N95 masks that are easier to breathe in. Welcome, the floor is yours.
Fritz Prinz, Stanford University:
Good morning. I’m Fritz Prinz and I teach in mechanic engineering and in material science at Stanford University. I also direct the nanoscale prototyping laboratory. I’m pleased today to introduce to you Dr. John Xu who is currently a research engineer in our laboratory. John got his PhD at Stanford University in mechanic engineering. And I’m very pleased to tell that he was one of our best students. And now he tries to exploit his deep understanding and knowledge in electric chemistry and apply it to enhancing N95 masks. So at this point in time I would like to hand it over to John and he will give you the ideas and present some of the key opportunities and challenges with the work he’s currently doing. John?
John Xu, Stanford University:
Hi everyone. Thank you very much for the invitation and the kind introduction. Here we’re proposing a possibility of using electrolysis to help with relieving this unfortunate COVID-19 situation. Go to the next slide please. So under this pandemic sanitized air has been in large demand by almost everyone. So the conventional way is to pass the air through a filter, for example a face covering or wearing a mask. This has been proving effective in slowing the spread of this virus. And it works for most healthy people. Here we are proposing using electrolysis to generate clean oxygen directly from pure water which is relieve the virus which we think would fulfill the need for people who have actually demand in oxygen. And it’s pretty eye opening and interesting to me that as Kathy has mentioned earlier that the invention of electrolysis was originally for the purpose of providing a clean oxygen. Can we go to the next slide please?
So actually the N95 mask model may suggest a need for such a combination by both filtering air and also provides a supplementary oxygen source. So from this simple model _____ putting on a mask in particular N95 is a lack of conductive mass transport. So the mass transport of oxygen into our respiratory system would convert from conductive way to a dismissive way which relies heavily on the pressure difference. Next please. And can you hit next again. Yeah, and the pressure difference can amount to about four percent of the atmosphere as shown by our measurement which is also in line with other observations in literature. We are facing a lowered oxygen concentration in our breathing environment by about 4 percent drop from 21 percent of oxygen to 17 percent measured in that space in the N95 mask. And meanwhile the CO2 concentration also increased roughly by about four percent. Go to the next please.
And in response to this abnormal breathing environment our human body would change the respiratory behavior as highlighted by the red box here. The breath frequency would decrease while the breath volume is increased. So we’ll have a faster pace of breathing which – sorry. A slower pace of breathing with also a larger volume. However the product of the two still corresponds to lower oxygen intake by about 5 to 15 percent. So for short time wearing N95 mask is proven to be fine and there’s no significant physiological symptoms related to short term wearing. However, long term wearing still needs investigations. Nevertheless they’re uncomfortable wearing still and is commonly complaint. And we’re speculating that this discomfort level is from the gas concentrations in our breathing environment which is off from the levels in the _____ air. Next please.
So since we have released our research project online we received a lot of emails from all over the world. Among them there are a lot of touching emails around our frontline doctors and nurses who are bravely fighting against COVID. And also there are emails who are from patients, especially the ones with the preconditions related to oxygen. And I also have to mention here that unfortunately some of these frontline doctors and nurses are getting COVID and turning to the patients. As showcased here there is one New York doctor who is a COVID survivor. And he decided to still see the COVID patients after he has recovered from COVID. He has to wear an N95 mask while also being oxygen dependent to support his normal functionality. They all need oxygens to apply. Can we go to the next please?
We also need – we also receive requests from COVID responders, for example truck drivers to deliver the medical supplies for hospitals and also people who have to interact with people for longer periods of time, for example dentists. So these reopening workforces are also – they also need a better protection for themselves who are also comfortable breathing experience. Can we do to the next please?
So at Stanford we’re proposing to develop a wearable air conditioner for N95 masks. So our site with Professor Prinz where we work on electrochemical processes we’re developing an electrochemical unit for a, to produce a small amount of pure clean oxygen which can be fed directly into the mask. While for another arm of the research which is led by Professor _____ whose expertise is in medical robotics and wearable gadgets were introducing an active venting management to reduce the CO2 and the moisture level. Go to the next please.
So there are two big branches of research scope. One is we’re going to test at the medical school at Stanford on the respirator responses to the engineering gas level in our breath environment. And the research efforts at the school of engineering would be to fix the oxygen generator and the CO2 remover into the form factor which is suitable for people to use. Next please.
So speaking of electrolysis we have charge electrolyzer plus fuel cell while due to some form factor considerations we also are trying a direct oxygen enrichment by changing the cathode reactions from HOR to OR. However due to this sluggish oxygen __ we are still facing a significant or potential roughly about one volt under reasonable current density. So here are some capacity estimations. For a common N95 conditioner that we are looking for, we are to provide about 100 SCCM which would correspond to about 30 watts. Or if we are to move one step forward to make a medical grade oxygen generator we’re looking at about a 600 to 1,500 watts per unit. So given the large demand now the total capacity of these electrochemical devices may amount to a gigawatt level per year. Move to the next slide please.
So taking this opportunity I would also like to call more research resources and collaboration opportunities between academia and industry directing towards finding more active OER and OR catalysts and also developing small form factor stacks. And also potentially brainstorm maybe their can be a direct electrochemical disinfection process which can directly oxidize the virus so that we do not need to concentrate pure oxygen from air. Thank you very much.
Vanessa Arjona:
Ok. Thank you so much for that presentation. And again I want to thank all the speakers today and all other stakeholders who also provided us with input on how they’re making a difference during this pandemic. And this is just a testament of how committed this community is. And it’s so empowering to see all of the good that you are all enabling through all these activities and to make sure frontline institutions battling this pandemic are better equipped. So thank you. So with that I’ll turn it over back to you Eric.
Eric Parker:
Yeah. Thanks Vanessa. And thank you again to all of our speakers. We’re going to jump into the Q&A portion now. We have just under 15 minutes. And I’ll remind everyone again if you haven’t already please submit some questions in the Q&A box on the right and we’ll do our best to get to all of them. The first question though I think I’ll pose to the whole panel about lessons learned. So if you had to pick the most significant lesson you learned from having to quickly adapt your processes to develop these new products to support the fight against COVID-19 what would that lesson be? And just unmute yourselves and take it away whoever would like to answer.
Jayesh Doshi:
This is Jayesh. I would like to jump in and share my thoughts on this. One of the most important things we learned is that as we were scaling up manufacturing production, safety was very, very critical to avoid any kind of accident where employees would be exposed to solvents. So to do that we very quickly request help from chemical industry, chemical industry plant locally. But that was a big thing because we almost came very close to having an accident as people were trying to make a lot of chemicals very rapidly and using the right equipment, right safety gears. And I think it’s very important that safety needs to be kept in front.
Eric Parker:
Thanks Jayesh. Any of the other panelists like to chime in?
Kathy Ayers:
I’d like – this is Kathy. I’d like to add to that. I think safety was the primary consideration for us as well. Not so much that we were making something new but that we had to do things completely differently to keep our business running to supply our customers who are looking for hydrogen for these types of applications. So figuring out in the midst of danger to our own employees how to protect them from spread of virus and such, we had to revamp all of our PPE and how we were doing things because building things tends to be close work. And so there was a lot of review around CDC guidelines and medical guidelines and such to make sure that everybody felt safe and was safe.
Eric Parker:
Great. Thanks Kathy. Monjid, do you have any lessons learned from Giner?
Monjid Hamdan:
Yeah. So again I think I mentioned this. But sometimes the simplest solutions can be the most effective. And we try to produce something that we get out there very quickly. We also considered making oxygen concentrators. We have that technology in house where you bring in air and you concentrate and you have an output of your oxygen. However, we were looking at the time to do that. We would need to perhaps qualify that, qualify it as a medical device. So again it came down to the safety of their product and the qualifications. So again we took the simplest solution, tried to make it effective. But we are still considering some of these longer term solutions.
Eric Parker:
Great. Great. And lastly Fritz or John do you have anything to share?
Fritz Prinz:
The most important things that I have obtained from this experience, the willingness of the people to fight back. We do not accept this challenge which is unprecedented, incredible. But people do not accept it and are willing to fight back in a major way and take everything they know and everything they do and try to come up with solutions. And I guess John gave you just one example today. And I think the response from the medical community particularly from a hospital is tremendous where they see the opportunities, what can be done to improve the situation.
Eric Parker:
Great. Thanks everyone for sharing. I just got another great question that I think applies to everyone. Do any of you see any innovations coming out of this crisis that can create ongoing opportunities maybe once it has settled down?
Monjid Hamdan:
Yeah. I would say there are several. I think the heightened public awareness around health and wellbeing and the heightened understanding that like hospitals are not infinite facilities that could sustain as many people as we have has created both B2B and B2C opportunities for people that are making products that help to address healthcare related needs in innovative ways. So I mean I imagine that a lot of folks that are making PPE are going to keep making components for PPE even after the crisis.
Jayesh Doshi:
This is Jayesh. We have already started an effort here to develop how to reduce plastic waste as the surgical face mask, disposable one people use and many of these are going to end up into landfill and/or wastewater streams. So the goal is how to make a comfortable face mask which people are happy to wear for long period of time. However it can be washed. It can be sanitized in microwave or oven and can be reused for a month or longer period of time. And we believe we are working towards innovating something new based on the material science and the technology we have to develop a reusable face mask.
John Xu:
So this is John from Stanford. So from my research efforts in the past, especially the ones associated with developing oxygen concentrations of today, I’m thinking it’s becoming more important if we can or maybe more promising to develop stacks that which are small. In the past I think at least my effort has been developing a stack which is large for energy applications. But developing stacks which is small can also have benefits. For example in the healthcare industry. And also making a small and modular it may also increase the popularity or enable more applications of _____ devices in general.
Eric Parker:
Thank you. Yeah. So perhaps branching off that a little bit, we’ve talked about some really great products that our speakers have been helping make to fight COVID. In terms of R&D where do you, the panel, see opportunities maybe down the pike for R&D labs or test labs to help in a situation of maybe upcoming advancements or developments in the R&D area?
Monjid Hamdan:
Maybe I could take that one. This is Monjid. So on the R&D side there are oxygen concentrators that have been used for various applications. It really hasn’t been used for the medical community. You could – you can probably do it a little bit cheaper with a _____. But there’s opportunities there to make these devices for medical applications, lower the cost, reduce the catalyst that’s used there, reduce the power input, and make these more efficient. So I think there’s again for the smaller electrolyzers. And essentially these are electrolyzers that have been depolarized. So you’re putting air onto the hydrogen side to make them safe. You’re not putting hydrogen out there in the atmosphere or where it could collect in the room. But there’s some opportunities there I think.
Fritz Prinz:
Yes, I would like to build on that argument as far as efficiency is concerned which is particularly important for portable devices. If you need something lightweight, if you need something which doesn’t take a lot of volume, efficiency is very important because it does mean it requires less power. And in particular as far as electrochemistry is concerned you’ve really got to make sure that every electron and every hydrogen molecule is being utilized very effectively and very efficiently. So direct catalysts, minimum ____ losses through the membranes. All of these are very, very important issues and even more important as they get to smaller portable devices because weight becomes an issue and you’ve got to make sure you don’t need to wear heavy power supplies with you.
Kathy Ayers:
I guess I’d like to answer both of those questions combined. So I think one of the things that we’ve seen is that with COVID first of all there has tended to be higher mortality rates where there is more pollution. And also with the shutdown of a lot of industries and transportation and all of these things a lot of places have really demonstrated a large improvement in cleanliness. And so I think that has spurred at least in some areas a desire to move more quickly to go to more sustainable technologies like renewable hydrogen. So I think looking at the challenges that we have there and pushing the envelope on trying to make the electrolyzers as cheap and efficient as possible is going to be extremely important as we move forward to try to make things better for everybody. And those needs are documented in a few different places, DOE and some European documents and others.
Eric Parker:
Great. Thanks everybody. I want to make sure we got everyone. Did anyone else want to chime in on that? I think we hit all our panelists. Ok. Well, with that I think we’re just about out of time so it’s a good place to wrap up. So thank you everyone for your attention today and thank you again to our amazing presenters and their important work. If we didn’t get to your question, apologies. And I would also like to apologize for the slight delay we had earlier on the video. I think a lot of people might be using WebEx these days. But thanks for your patience there. And as always please remember to share using the H2IQ hashtag on social media today or in the future. And stay tuned for more topics like these and other R&D or Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technologies Office funded projects. And we will be posting the recording and slides for this presentation on our website in the near future. And with that I would like to have, wish everyone a good week. Stay safe, stay healthy and goodbye.
Fritz Prinz:
Thank you.
Monjid Hamdan:
Thank you.