BMW Group, Airbus and Quantinuum Collaborate to Fast-Track Sustainable Mobility Research

With a focus on the chemical reactions of catalysts in fuel cells, Airbus, BMW Group, and Quantinuum, global leaders in mobility and quantum technologies, have created a hybrid quantum-classical workflow to speed up future research utilising quantum computers to model quantum systems.

The three partners describe precisely simulating the oxygen reduction process (“ORR”) on the surface of a platinum-based catalyst in a recent technical paper titled “Applicability of Quantum Computing to Oxygen Reduction Reaction Simulations” that was published on arXiv.

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The chemical reaction known as the ORR, which occurs in a fuel cell, restricts the process’s effectiveness by converting hydrogen and oxygen into water and energy. Understanding the underlying processes of the reaction is very important and valuable because it is relatively slow and needs a lot of platinum catalyst.

The partnership team has proven the use of quantum computing in an industrial workflow to improve  understanding of a crucial chemical reaction using Quantinuum’s H-Series quantum computer. The three businesses intend to work together even further to investigate how quantum computing might be used to address pertinent industrial concerns.

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“Circularity and sustainable mobility are putting us on a quest for new materials, to create more efficient products and shape the future premium user experience,” said Dr. Peter Lehnert, Vice-President, Research Technologies at BMW Group. With the help of the accelerated quantum computing hardware, we can model material properties with significant chemical accuracy, which gives us the ideal tools for accelerating innovation in this important field.