Who’s working on fuel cells?

Fuel cells turn hydrogen and other fuels into electricity without burning them, and the open problems are cost and lifetime: less platinum in the catalyst, membranes and stacks that last, and solid oxide cells that survive thermal cycling. This page shows how much of that work the Helikon Research Graph holds and gives you a problem statement to run in Partner Search.

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What the Helikon Research Graph holds on fuel cells

37,000+

researchers

149,000+

publications

10,000+

U.S. patents

Counts from the Helikon Research Graph on 13 October 2026, rounded down. Each figure is counted on its own, so they aren’t added together.

How these were counted

Publications: papers whose title, author names or research topics match the keyword set below, the same text the Literature search reads.
U.S. patents: granted U.S. patents whose text matches the keyword set and that carry at least one of these CPC subclasses: H01M. That is the Patents search with the CPC subclass field set.
Researchers: people in the graph who authored a matching publication or are named inventors on a matching patent.
Keyword set: "fuel cell" OR "PEMFC" OR "SOFC" OR "DMFC" OR "AEMFC" OR "membrane electrode assembly" OR "gas diffusion layer" OR "oxygen reduction reaction"

Try it on a real problem

Partner Search ranks researchers against a problem statement by what their publications, patents and profiles say. This one’s ready to run. Edit it to fit your project.

Our PEM fuel cell stacks for heavy trucks lose too much voltage in the first few thousand hours, and we need to cut cathode platinum loading at the same time. Looking for a group with catalyst layer design and accelerated durability testing.

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Who’s working on this

Electrochemistry, materials and chemical engineering groups at universities, national laboratory hydrogen and fuel cell programs, environmental engineering groups working on microbial fuel cells, and company teams at automakers, stack makers and catalyst and membrane suppliers. Many of the same electrochemists also work on electrolyzers and batteries.

Universities and research labs

Ranked by researchers with work in this area, researchers whose main topic it is, and the U.S. patents they own.

Georgia Institute of Technology
474 researchers · 1,316 publications · 20 U.S. patents
Pennsylvania State University
353 researchers · 1,587 publications · 24 U.S. patents
Argonne National Laboratory
146 researchers · 1,291 publications · 24 U.S. patents
University of California, Irvine
235 researchers · 751 publications · 1 U.S. patent
California Institute of Technology
84 researchers · 673 publications · 63 U.S. patents
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
194 researchers · 1,382 publications · 19 U.S. patents
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
108 researchers · 1,037 publications · 17 U.S. patents
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
153 researchers · 1,204 publications · 26 U.S. patents

Companies

Ranked by the U.S. patents they own in this area and the researchers who work on it.

General Motors
66 researchers · 446 publications · 614 U.S. patents
3M
45 researchers · 136 publications · 106 U.S. patents
Ford Motor Company
65 researchers · 195 publications · 129 U.S. patents
FuelCell Energy
13 researchers · 184 publications · 136 U.S. patents
General Electric
30 researchers · 97 publications · 71 U.S. patents
Corning
34 researchers · 35 publications · 33 U.S. patents
Dow Chemical
70 researchers · 62 publications · 12 U.S. patents
DuPont
36 researchers · 100 publications · 23 U.S. patents

Specialists

Organizations where at least a quarter of their researchers work in this area.

Plug Power
6 researchers · 46 publications · 43 U.S. patents
Giner
5 researchers · 123 publications · 3 U.S. patents
National Laboratory of the Rockies
116 researchers · 878 publications · 2 U.S. patents
National Energy Technology Laboratory
33 researchers · 506 publications · 7 U.S. patents
Savannah River National Laboratory
29 researchers · 121 publications · 2 U.S. patents
Institute for Advanced Energy Technologies · Italy
6 researchers · 445 publications
Ceres Power · United Kingdom
11 researchers · 37 publications · 31 U.S. patents
Ballard Power Systems · Canada
12 researchers · 247 publications · 120 U.S. patents

From the Helikon Research Graph on 13 October 2026. Researchers are people now at the organization who authored a matching publication or are named inventors on a matching patent. Publications are matching publications that list the organization among their authors’ affiliations at the time of publication, counted once each. Patents are matching U.S. patents the organization owns. Each name opens the organization’s page on Helikon Labs.

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