Golden chance

While the most efficient electro-catalyst in electric car fuel cells for constant-speed motorway driving is platinum, for stop-start motoring such as around towns and cities, platinum dissolves, which reduces its efficiency.

For years this has impeded platinum's application to fuel cells for vehicles but research in the US could provide fresh hope and solve the problem. Scientists at the Department of Energy's

in New York have discovered that by imitating the environment of a fuel cell in lab conditions, platinum electrocatalysts remain intact when gold clusters are added to them.

After being put through five days of accelerated tests that simulated stop-start driving conditions, researchers found that as much as 45 per cent of platinum cathode electrocatalysts were lost after 30,000 oxidation-reduction cycles.

Under the same test conditions but with the addition of gold clusters, the loss was 'almost nothing to notice, or negligible', according to Radoslav Adzic, one of the four Brookhaven researchers behind the project.