PRESENTATION FOR SBANE INNOVATION AWARD SEMIFINALS (3 minute speech)

MAY 1, 2007
Gary Simon

Good Afternoon.

Acumentrics is a 12-year old innovator in power supplies based in Westwood, MA. We have invented a remarkable and even revolutionary new fuel cell system that could bring about a change in the way the world generates power equal to the switch from vacuum tubes to microchips.

All fuel cells work by using chemical reactions to “pump” electrons. There are four primary ways to drive the “pump”—with hydrogen (the one most often talked about), with alcohol, with carbon dioxide, and in our case with oxygen. The huge advantage with using an oxygen pump is that oxygen is abundantly available from the air. With the other three, hydrogen, alcohol, and carbon dioxide must all come from somewhere else.

But we cannot claim the oxygen pump as new. That part of the technology has been known for six decades. It is done with some special solid-state ceramics operating at temperatures over 1,500 degrees F. However, those ceramics are fragile and have cracked easily under the thermal shock of start-up and shut down. Think of the problem of taking a glass out of an oven at 1500 degrees and plunging it into water. It shatters. That’s thermal shock.

The invention that we have made is a ceramic fuel cell that is shatterproof. It is shatterproof because of its shape—it is a tube not a thin sheet as most others have used—and because of the special composition of the layers that prevent them from flaking off.

But our innovations go farther. We have now shown how this fuel cell can be built inexpensively—and had that demonstration independently confirmed by the US DOE. We have increased the output of a single tube from 1 watt to 100 watts in seven years. We have shown that complete systems producing power can meet all the rigorous test requirements of the DOE for reliability, durability, efficiency, and start-stop cycling. We have shown that the same basic design can be used for generating electricity from a few watts to hundreds of megawatts simply by changing the size of the tubes. And it can do that with no detectable emissions of NOx, SOx, CO or particulates, with few moving parts, and virtually silently.

Our units have been run on natural gas, propane, ethanol, diesel, gasified biomass and biodiesel. It probably will run on many more fuels. To do that we need to add a second innovation, not one we can claim but very important, and that is an inexpensive fuel processor that converts heavy fuels into light ones, all using the excess heat of the fuel cell itself. We have shown that working for over 1400 hours now.

Finally our fuel cells can be integrated to provide not only electricity, but also home heating, hot water, and chilled air. We have appliance partners in Europe and Japan that are building prototypes of just such units now. We have come up with a design for a complete home energy appliance or HEA. It’s the size of a dishwasher. We expect to place 250 of those in homes in the next 2 years.

Our tubular solid oxide fuel cell outperforms not only all other fuel cells, but also the conventional technologies for making electricity. We have delivered 32 fully functional units to the field and have customers wanting more as fast as we can make them. It is durable, inexpensive and efficient. We believe this innovation truly can revolutionize the production of electricity from a wide variety of fuels and in a wide variety of applications—both stationary and mobile. It is the next step beyond using engines to turn magnets in coil of copper wire to now a solid-state device with almost no moving parts, no wear, and no pollution. It is ready to move to market and become not just an invention but a true innovation.

-Thank you.