High sample through-put, variable atmosphere thermogravimetric (TGA) / differential thermal (DTA) analyzer for materials development for energy delivery and storage applications

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In the current era of ever depleting oil and natural gas reserves, concerns regarding greenhouse gas emissions and increasing attention to air quality, there is an urgent need to develop new means of storing and delivering energy. Fuel cells can meet this demand by efficiently and cleanly converting fuels to electricity, while batteries and hydrogen gas storage devices can store energy for transportation applications. These new technologies, however, still require further development because their capacity to store energy is still too small, their cost too high, and in the case of fuel cells, their durability still requires improvement. In order to deal with materials issues that directly impact on commercialization of these technologies, a world class facility has been established at the University of Calgary. As part of this facility, the Thangadurai, Birss, Shimizu, and Khan research groups have developed significant advances in the areas of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell, lithium ion batteries, hydrogen storage materials, and diffusion bonding techniques. Further advances require enhancing the performance of a vast array of structured catalysts, ceramics, metal-organic frameworks, and metals. This requires the rapid assessment of various combinations of catalyst, ceramic, metal, and organic components in order to achieve the best performance. An ideal instrument to serve these goals and allow optimization of materials synthesis and high temperature compatibility between components, as well as monitoring of their reactivity with a gas environment, is variable atmosphere thermogravimetric (TGA) / differential thermal (DTA) analysis. This technique detects minute changes in mass and heat as a function of temperature and gas atmosphere. While two of these instruments do exist here, one is 11 years old and on its last legs and the second is of use only for highly specialized experiments. However, this substantially diminishes student training and the analyses done by others at a distance will not give the same quality of research. Therefore, we are requesting a combined TGA/DTA which will directly complement the existing infrastructure within our energy delivery and storage materials fabrication/testing facility.