The GAIA project has been awarded 3rd place in the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI) 2023 Innovation Awards. As well as celebrating the advancements in sustainability and chemistry, this event organised at the Palace of Westminster in London on 10 May 2023 was an opportunity to highlight winners of some of SCI’s most important awards, many of which have been presented over several decades to leading scientists and innovators.

GAIA has won the best Success Story award on "Advancing membrane technology", with 523 votes (47 %) of the 1 122 total votes cast by the public.
GAIA is taking the technology another step closer to commercial deployment and helping to decarbonise the transport sector.

next Generation AutomotIve membrane electrode Assemblies
Grant agreement no.: 826097
Start date: 01.01.2019 – Duration: 42 months
Coordinator: CNRS, France

The GAIA consortium has succeeded in reaching the 1.8 W/cm² @ 0.6 V fuel cell power density target set by the FCH 2 JU 2018 Call for Proposals, a significant step forward for fuel cell technology.

Three of the innovations developed in the GAIA project has been identified by the European Commission's Innovation Radar:
- New PEM fuel cell components to achieve a power density of 1.8 W/cm².
- Thin PBI-reinforced PFSA membranes for PEM fuel cell applications.
- Carbon blacks serving as a substrate for Pt nanoparticles for PEM fuel cell applications.

The team at TUB, whose focus within GAIA is the development of advanced electrocatalysts, illustrates in this movie the various steps in catalyst synthesis and in catalyst screening via the rotating disc electrode (RDE) technique. The TUM team, focusing on catalyst integration into MEAs and diagnosing MEA performance losses, shows in this movie the various steps involved in MEA preparation and in MEA testing/diagnostics in small-active-area single-cell PEM fuel cells

This year’s Best Success Story winner:
‘Driving forward fuel cell technologies’, involves 5 projects
(VOLUMETRIQ, INSPIRE, CRESCENDO, GAIA and PEGASUS)
which are making fuel cells more affordable and competitive.

Develop a high performance automotive MEA that provides the materials and designs that satisfy the cost target by providing high power density at high current density, while also attaining the other essential objectives of durability, reliability and high operation temperature.

The consortium gathers four industrial partners (BMW group, Johnson Matthey Fuel cells and 3M Advanced Materials Division, Freudenberg Performance Materials), two SMEs (Elmarco and Pretexo), and four research institutes (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Technical University of Munich, Technical University of Berlin and ZSW).