Fuel cell developers have demonstrated remarkable improvements in performance, durability, and range of operation in recent years. Several promising new materials have been identified. Still, no single prototype has yet met all of the requirements for commercialization in a single product. As a result, cell stack and powerplant designs have continued to evolve to meet those challenges, and the industry has not yet reached the stability in design that allows suppliers to capitalize manufacturing equipment and achieve the order-of-magnitude cost reductions that widespread market acceptance demands.

Industry has moved in recent years to highlight durability and reliability concerns, and researchers have responded in kind with identification of key degradation mechanisms and suggestions for mitigation strategies. Are there other show-stoppers to fuel cell development that such fundamental studies can help to solve? Can new materials provide a more robust solution? Can we anticipate a system design that is robust enough to fix key features for manufacturing yet remains flexible enough to accommodate new materials as they are identified?

At this conference, we will discuss the limitations of current systems and materials, and discuss whether current materials can be combined with proper design to deliver a practical, economically viable fuel cell powerplant. We will also examine whether novel materials that show great promise on the basis of a few key metrics will be able to meet the sum total of requirements for practical systems -- specifically durability, robustness, and insensitivity to variation in operating conditions. Through discussion, we will try to highlight the liabilities of current and novel materials to stimulate ideas about how to minimize their shortcomings by engineering and design or, where appropriate, to suggest areas of research to overcome those liabilities. We will examine theoretical aspects of rational catalyst, membrane and system designs and determine where gaps in our understanding still exist.