Johnson Matthey has joined new European consortium, ‘IMMORTAL,’ to develop higher performance fuel cell components for heavy duty trucks with a predicted lifetime of at least 30,000 hours.

IMMORTAL is a EUR3.8m (US$4.6m), three-year project supported by the European Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH 2 JU), which brings together a consortium of industry leaders and academic/research organisations coordinated by France’s CNRS and includes Johnson Matthey, Bosch, FPT Industrial and AVL.

The project will deliver management of the fuel cell powertrain with high performance and durability as critical outcomes. The industrial and academic partners will collaborate to advance materials and components which have shown considerable promise in recent European FCH 2 JU projects.

The four large industrial partners of IMMORTAL are major stakeholders in Europe’s fuel cell supply, OEM and end user chain, from MEA (Johnson Matthey) to stack (Bosch, AVL) and from stack and system (Bosch, FPT Industrial) to the use of the fuel cell powertrains in heavy duty long haulage trucks (FPT Industrial).