Swedish clean energy group Morphic Technologies has made a string of acquisitions recently, gobbling up the Greek energy company Helbio last June, Italian fuel cell maker Arcotronics in November and the Swiss energy storage company AccaGen last month. Morphic includes a parent company and six subsidiaries engaged in the manufacture of fuel cells and wind turbines and servicing and maintenance of hydroelectric power plants. The deals provide Morphic with new fuel cell technology and various processes for storing energy from renewable sources.Â
The acquisition of Arcotronics provides Morphic with a variety of different fuel cell designs to incorporate into its energy systems. Most of Arcotronics’ patented technology relates to equipment and techniques for manufacturing batteries and capacitors. For example, U.S. Patent No. 7,215,532 claims a machine with a rotating frame, a polygonal support structure, spacers and rolls for storing plastic film raw material. The rotation of the frame winds the film onto the support, creating multiple film layers of uniform shape and thickness. The spacers are arranged at the first film layer at locations corresponding to the corners of the polygon and serve to maintain the structure of the resulting capacitor. This technique provides more uniformity among different regions of the wound film, and thus more uniform electrical characteristics, and also permits production of capacitors of different shapes by substituting different support structures.
Helbio’s technology relates to hydrogen production from biofuel raw materials. Helbio holds one U.S. patent on a method of producing hydrogen from ethanol by oxidation. U.S. Patent No. 6,605,376 covers a process of mixing ethanol with oxygen in the presence of a catalyst to produce hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide.  The patent also covers a method including the additional steps of fermenting biomass to produce the ethanol starting material and directing the resulting hydrogen gas to a fuel cell.
The AccaGen deal also provides Morphic with hydrogen production capability. AccaGen makes electrolyzers for separating water into hydrogen and oxygen.
