{"id":48862,"date":"2022-03-25T07:44:16","date_gmt":"2022-03-24T21:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aumanufacturing.com.au\/?p=48862"},"modified":"2022-03-28T08:20:02","modified_gmt":"2022-03-27T21:50:02","slug":"hydrogen-startup-anticipates-30-new-hires-over-next-12-months","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aumanufacturing.com.au\/hydrogen-startup-anticipates-30-new-hires-over-next-12-months","title":{"rendered":"Hydrogen startup anticipates 30 new hires over next 12 months"},"content":{"rendered":"
University of Wollongong-headquartered Hysata recently made headlines with a breakthrough paper in Nature Communications<\/em>, demonstrating a \u201cgiant leap\u201d in water splitting progress and a claim to be on track to $2\/kilogram hydrogen by 2025.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n The UoW spinout business was launched in mid-2021 with $5 million in seed funding<\/a> from the IP Group and the <\/span>Clean Energy Finance Corporation<\/span>. According to its leadership team it is in 30 or so active customer conversations at this moment.<\/span><\/p>\n Hysata plans to establish a pilot plant this year, where it will make its modular, 250 mm diameter electrolysis plates, and is working towards production, planned for 2025.<\/span><\/p> @AuManufacturing<\/span><\/i> spoke to Hysata’s CEO Paul Barrett and CTO Professor Gerry Swiegers (also of UoW\u2019s <\/span>Intelligent Polymer Research Institute<\/span><\/a>) last week about their new electrolyser approach and the path to commercialisation.<\/span><\/p>\n @AuManufacturing<\/i><\/b>:<\/b> Could you give an idea about how your approach was formulated, roughly speaking, and about deciding to start with a clean sheet of paper rather than looking at a current electrolyser design and perhaps deciding to tweak a thing here or there?\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Gerry Swiegers: <\/b>S<\/span><\/i>ure. If you look at the history of water electrolysis, it’s been around for 200 years and the industrial history of it has been that people have developed new types of cells that have less electrical resistance. The key was to find ways to reduce the electrical resistance in the cell, and it turns out that electrolysis cells actually have many, many different sources for that. And so we started with a clean sheet with two new PhD students at the time. The challenge we set them and ourselves was to come up with a way to remove or reduce as many of those electrical resistances within the cell as possible. And we tried to conceive of cell designs <\/span>for that, and that’s where the concept came from. And once we had developed the concept, then we challenged the new students to go and study it and see whether it was possible. I have to say the two students were excellent. Aaron Hodges<\/a> and Anh Linh Hoang<\/a> did an excellent job in teasing out all of the information. And that’s the reason for the high performance that we have now.<\/p> Paul Barrett:<\/b> I think it’s also worth pointing out that Gerry’s pretty humble, and a Nature<\/em> paper is a big deal. These are rare occasions to have a publication in a journal of that kind of pedigree. Gerry and his team not only did this invention and proof of concept, but Gerry went straight into mass manufacture mode. He said, \u2018OK, we’ve got a good concept here, but good concepts don’t get you into manufacturing quickly.\u2019 You’ve really got to have a manufacturing mindset, and it was integrated into Gerry’s research lab and is now oozing so the company. Everything has got to be designed for flexibility.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n