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Highly Efficient Oxygen Catalyst Found

Posted by Soulskill on from the fuel-for-the-cause dept.

eldavojohn writes "As detailed in the journal Science (abstract), a new compound composed of cobalt, iron and oxygen with other metals presents us with the most efficient way (found so far) of splitting oxygen atoms from water. These ten known compounds provide a reactivity rate that is at least an order of magnitude higher than what is currently known as the gold standard in such reactions. During their research, the team discovered that the reactivity is dependent on the configuration of the outermost electron of transition metal ions, which they exploited to develop this efficient catalyst. For rechargeable batteries and hydrogen fuel, this is exciting work from MIT's Jin Suntivich, Kevin J. May, Hubert A. Gasteiger, and Yang Shao-Horn, and the University of Texas's John B. Goodenough."

8 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Hydrogen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    But I thought it was hydrogen we wanted from water. What good is being able to split off oxygen?

    1. Re:Hydrogen by Flyerman · · Score: 4, Funny

      The thing about Water, is that if you pull out the Oxygen, you end up with Hydrogen. It's pretty cool how that happens, I know.

    2. Re:Hydrogen by m.ducharme · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Unless of course the hydrogen binds to another chemical in the process of catalysing.

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    3. Re:Hydrogen by m.ducharme · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No, but other things may bind to the hydrogen, especially if the reaction occurs in open air. I thought about this after I posted, and went and checked the article. The article states that another catalyst is needed to separated out the hydrogen, indicating that it does bind to something other than the oxygen or the catalyst. The reason the article focusses on the oxygen-separating catalyst is that it is the bottle-neck, and not the hydrogen-separating catalyst.

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    4. Re:Hydrogen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      The thing about this catalyst is, it works in alkaline solutions to produce water and oxygen. From the article (I know, I'm not supposed to actually read on /.) the reaction is 4OH- > O2 + 2 H2O + 4e-

  2. Some questions here. by CFD339 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    First, "at a rate 10 times the previous gold standard" is interesting, but meaningless. What is the actual rate, and how is it measured?

    Second, what is the cost and availability of the materials needed for the catalyst? Does this require some kind of unobtainium? The article is very vague here.

    Third, Is this something we can practically manufacture in any kind of real scale or are we talking microscopic results measurable only in the lab?

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    1. Re:Some questions here. by Arlet · · Score: 5, Informative

      Second, what is the cost and availability of the materials needed for the catalyst? Does this require some kind of unobtainium? The article is very vague here.

      If I'm not mistaken, the materials are listed right there, in the abstract:

      Ba0.5Sr0.5Co0.8Fe0.2O3

      (Barium, Strontium, Cobalt and Iron, all abundant)

  3. Re:Catalyst Theory? by Rostin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I wouldn't consider myself a catalysis expert, but I do computational materials research to predict how atoms are arranged in the surfaces of alloys in order to understand how that affects their catalytic properties, so I do know a thing or three about it. The answer to your question is mostly no. There are good explanations of how catalysts work in many particular cases, but there is certainly no known straightforward way to design a catalyst to do arbitrarily specified chemistry.

    Think about this paper. I haven't read it yet, but from the abstract, it looks like it's about a group of researchers finding a single parameter that controls the activity of a particular, narrow class of materials for a particular reaction, and then exploiting that to create an optimal catalyst within this class of materials for that reaction. And for doing that, they were published in Science, which suggests that it's fairly clever, important, and original work. That should give you an idea about what the state of the art is in catalyst design.

    John Goodenough, by the way, is about 90 years old, still sharp as a tack, and a world expert in metal oxides (what the catalysts in this study were made out of). Back in the 70s, he "invented" (that's probably not the best word) the cathode material that's still being used in most commercial Li-ion batteries. I just say that to make the point that this research was probably not something that many people have the depth of understanding to do.