Five ECS short courses will be offered at PRiME 2016 in Honolulu this October!

What are short courses? Taught by academic and industry experts in intimate learning settings, short courses offer students and professionals alike the opportunity to greatly expand their knowledge and technical expertise.

PRiME 2016 short courses will be held on Sunday, October 2, 2016 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Don’t miss the early-bird deadline of September 2, 2016! Register today!

Short Course #5: Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells

Hubert A. Gasteiger and Thomas J. Schmidt, Instructors 

This short course develops the fundamental thermodynamics and electrocatalytic processes critical to polymer electrolyte fuel cells (PEFCs, including Direct Methanol and Alkaline Membrane FCs). In the first part, we will discuss the relevant half-cell reactions, their thermodynamic driving forces, and their mathematical foundations in electrocatalysis theory (e.g., Butler-Volmer equations). Subsequently, this theoretical framework will be applied to catalyst characterization and the evaluation of kinetic parameters like activation energies, exchange current densities, reaction orders, etc.

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Hubert Gasteiger of Technische Universität München’s Institute for Technical Electrochemistry will be awarded the 2015 Physical and Analytical Electrochemistry Division David C. Grahame Award for his work focusing on materials, electrodes, and diagnostics development for fuel cells and batteries.

The prestigious award was established in 1981 to encourage excellence in physical electrochemistry research.

Hubert A. Gasteiger has touched many aspects of electrochemical science, from academia to industry. He studied at UC Berkeley before he went on to do a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, followed by academic research with Jürgen Behm at Ulm University—where he established a research group in heterogeneous gas-phase catalysis and electrocatalysis.

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