Schriften des Forschungszentrums Jülich Energy & Environment ...

Proceedings WHEC2010 VII
Preface
Over the past few years, the three major reasons why novel energy technologies will be
required in the very next years have become common sense: to mitigate climate change, to
secure energy supply, and to foster economic competitiveness. Hydrogen and fuel cells have
great potential to meet all three of these societal requirements.
Being at the cutting edge of energy R&D, the government of North Rhine-Westphalia has
been supporting hydrogen and fuel cell technologies substantially for many years through the
Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Network NRW, by funding research projects, and not the least by
hosting the 18 th World Hydrogen Energy Conference 2010 in Essen.
Although the 18 th WHEC was overshadowed by the consequences of the subprime crisis and
the subsequent economic downturn, the number of participants was a record high. More than
1,350 people attended the scientific conference that offered 342 oral presentations in
49 sessions and 183 posters. The technological dimension materialized in an extensive trade
fair with 136 exhibitors and a notable share of one third of the presentations being given by
industry representatives. Such figures prove that hydrogen and fuel cell technologies are
timely and that industry, governments and academia recognize the potential they have of
providing viable solutions to the Grand Challenges mentioned above.
In order to ensure that the conference has a long-lasting impact, it was decided to fully
document the event in publicly available books. The introductory talks to the sessions are
available as full papers in the book entitled Hydrogen and Fuel Cells – Fundamentals,
Technology and Applications, edited by D. Stolten and published by Wiley-VCH. These
proceedings cover the speeches and technical presentations made on plenary day and the
oral presentations and posters in the parallel sessions. They have been published as a set of
seven books by the Juelich Research Center.
We gratefully acknowledge the wide-ranging support we had when editing this volume. First
of all, we would like to express our gratitude to the authors of the papers in the proceedings
who made it possible to promptly publish the talks given in the parallel sessions. Moreover,
we are grateful for copy-editing support from the PhD students at the Institute for Fuel Cells
in Juelich: Christiane Döll, Ralf Elze, Stefan Hürter, Dennis Krieg, Mirko Kvesić, Fang Liu,
Andreas Löhmer, Wiebke Maier, John McIntyre, Florian Scharf, Sebastian Schiebahn, Yong
Wang and Christiane Wiethege.
August 2010
Detlef Stolten Thomas Grube
Chairman of WHEC 2010 Member of the
WHEC 2010 Program Committee