Concord, MA., December 1, 2003. NASA has awarded Nanoptek Corporation a Phase II Small Business Innovative Research contract to continue development of their clean hydrogen fuel generation technology, the company announced today. Only companies who successfully completed an earlier Phase I contract were eligible to compete for the Phase II award. The value of the contract is $600,000 and the project is expected to require two years.
Nanoptek's hydrogen generation technology evolves hydrogen gas from water using only sunlight and their proprietary photolytic electrodes. Their unique technology promises higher efficiency, longer lifetime, and lower cost than competing technologies for hydrogen generation. Further, Nanoptek's "point-of-use" hydrogen generation reduces the problems of hydrogen transport and storage.
The goal is to produce clean, abundant, and low cost hydrogen fuel to supply hydrogen cars using internal combustion engines. Major automotive companies have shown near-production-ready versions of such hydrogen cars, with some planning production models as early as 2005.
Water purification is another important application, where Nanoptek's technology could evolve hydrogen from contaminated water to fuel others' commercially available fuel cells. Fuel cells create electricity by recombining hydrogen with oxygen, producing clean water as a by-product. Such systems could be located anywhere in the world where there is sunlight and water, for production of both clean electricity and clean water.
John Guerra, President and C.E.O. of Nanoptek, said, "We're extremely excited and proud that NASA has chosen us as one of only 145 companies nation-wide for a Phase II award. This is a strong indicator of the need for and strengths of our technology, for both space and ground-based applications. NASA's support will help us to play a significant, and hopefully even enabling, role in making the Hydrogen Economy happen sooner rather than later."
Nanoptek can be found at www.nanoptek.com . Nanoptek is a privately held technology company located in Concord MA.
Laser Focus World