Certion

Solid oxide electrolysis cells (SOECs) are the highest-efficiency electrolyzer technology ever demonstrated and the most credible path to sub-$1/kg green hydrogen. The single barrier between that promise and commercial scale is degradation: SOECs lose performance faster than buyers can underwrite, and the root causes have remained poorly understood for 25+ years. Certion exists to fix that.

What we do. Certion commercializes a body of theoretical, computational, and experimental work developed during the founder's PhD at the Colorado School of Mines (in partnership with Idaho National Laboratory and the DOE H2NEW consortium). The result is the first end-to-end toolchain for diagnosing, predicting, and mitigating solid-oxide cell degradation — and, on the hardware side, the first U.S.-engineered test stations designed to compete with the European incumbents that currently dominate this category.

SOCRATES (Solid Oxide Cell Rates) is our diagnostic and prognostic software platform. It couples Avrami phase-transformation kinetics with reliability engineering and nonlinear nonequilibrium statistical thermodynamics to deconvolve simultaneous degradation mechanisms from raw durability data — turning a noisy voltage curve into a quantitative, mechanism-by-mechanism lifetime forecast. Sold to cell and stack developers, OEMs, national labs, and the project finance teams that underwrite electrolyzer deployments.

RAM (Reconstruction and Analysis of Microstructures) is our microstructural simulation pipeline. Built around K-Walker, a novel multi-phase image segmentation algorithm we invented, RAM converts FIB-SEM electrode images into 3D digital twins and pore networks ready for downstream simulation — replacing slow, error-prone, manually-labeled workflows that today gate every microstructurally-resolved degradation study.

Test Stations (in development). The U.S. currently has no domestic supplier of SOFC/SOEC characterization stations at parity with HORIBA FuelCon (Germany), the de facto global incumbent. Certion is developing a next-generation U.S.-built test station line, designed from the ground up with our diagnostic software embedded — so customers don't just collect data, they collect data that already knows what's degrading and how long the cell has left. Target buyers: U.S. national labs, electrolyzer OEMs, automotive and defense R&D, and academic groups now waiting 12+ months on European lead times.

Customers. Three concentric circles. Inner ring: U.S. national labs and DOE-funded consortia (H2NEW, ARPA-E performers) — buyers we already work with through the founder's INL collaboration. Middle ring: SOEC/SOFC cell and stack manufacturers (Bloom Energy, Topsoe, Elcogen, FuelCell Energy, and the new wave of U.S. and Asian entrants). Outer ring: the project finance and insurance community that needs defensible lifetime models to underwrite hydrogen offtake agreements — a buyer almost no one is selling to yet.

Team and credentials. Certion is founded by Nooruddin "Noor" Jarrar, PhD (Chemical Engineering, Colorado School of Mines, 2026). His research has been funded by the Office of Naval Research and Mines' Mechanical Engineering Department, with collaborators at Idaho National Laboratory (Drs. Casteel, Hartvigsen, Kane, and Gering). During his doctoral work he designed and built a state-of-the-art cell characterization rig from P&ID to commissioning, invented the SOCRATES and PAM frameworks, derived a novel analytical solution for nickel particle coarsening validated against an 11-year SOFC stack test, identified the root cause of oxygen-electrode delamination, and proposed the first unifying hypothesis for nickel migration. He was recruited by INL in 2024 to develop diagnostic tools for the Faraday application under H2NEW. Prior industry experience includes Siemens Energy (decarbonization) and Sharjah National Oil Corporation (process engineering).

Beyond solid oxide. The mathematical machinery underneath SOCRATES — superposition of competing Avrami-type rates with reliability-engineering lifetime statistics — is fundamentally general. The same framework extends naturally to SEI evolution in lithium-ion batteries, catalyst deactivation, and corrosion in other energy systems. Solid oxide is where we win first; it is not where we stop.