28/05/2026
Hydrogen could replace fossil fuels in industries that can't run on electricity alone: steel, shipping, heavy manufacturing. The catch is that almost all hydrogen today is still made from fossil fuels, which defeats the purpose.
Make it instead by splitting water with renewable electricity, and you get truly clean hydrogen. A team of engineers in Germany is working on that. They're building a test bench for green hydrogen electrolyzers from scratch, developing electrode coatings designed to last over 80,000 hours.
To do that, they need to understand exactly what's happening inside the cell in real time. It's a corrosive, high-temperature environment, and most measurement technologies simply couldn't handle it. They did a global search, tested their options, and ended up with Vaisala's PR53AC inline refractometers.
𝗞𝗿𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗠𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗲, COO, 𝗶𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗺𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗚𝗺𝗯𝗛, commented: "We have been absolutely delighted with the performance."
Here's to the next 80,000 hours, Kristian and team!
Check out the full story: https://brnw.ch/21x2TrH
Photo courtesy of Ichem