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New Catalyst Is Better At Splitting Water Into Hydrogen And Oxygen (phys.org)
schwit1 shared an article from Phys.org:
Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen to produce clean energy can be simplified with a single catalyst developed by scientists at Rice University and the University of Houston. The electrolytic film produced at Rice and tested at Houston is a three-layer structure of nickel, graphene and a compound of iron, manganese and phosphorus. The foamy nickel gives the film a large surface, the conductive graphene protects the nickel from degrading and the metal phosphide carries out the reaction... Rice chemist Kenton Whitmire and Houston electrical and computer engineer Jiming Bao and their labs developed the film to overcome barriers that usually make a catalyst good for producing either oxygen or hydrogen, but not both simultaneously... Whitmire said the material is scalable and should find use in industries that produce hydrogen and oxygen or by solar- and wind-powered facilities that can use electrocatalysis to store off-peak energy.
In a comment on the original submission, Slashdot reader Martin S. opines, "If we can crack H20 and C02 we could make fuel to run existing vehicles with existing infrastructure and that fuel could be carbon neutral by using off peak renewable energy from wind farms and solar."
In a comment on the original submission, Slashdot reader Martin S. opines, "If we can crack H20 and C02 we could make fuel to run existing vehicles with existing infrastructure and that fuel could be carbon neutral by using off peak renewable energy from wind farms and solar."
I think the implication is that with abundant, easily generated H + O + C one could make hydrocarbon fuels, like gasoline.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I think the implication is that with abundant, easily generated H + O + C one could make hydrocarbon fuels, like gasoline.
There are pilot hydrogen fuel stations with on-site electrolysis, the idea being that you use off-peak power to fill the tanks, and don't have to transport hydrogen. Then you feed this into a FCEV. There is hydrogen fueling infrastructure in California, and more will be coming whether it makes sense or not.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The rest of the storage, distribution and usage infrastructure is already in place, so the challenge is creating an efficient factory that takes in air + water, splits it up, and cranks out gas as an output.
Basically, there is no such thing as a "perfect" catalyst. All catalysts eventually undergo some sort of degradation process as a side reaction and fail. So the trick is usually not finding a catalyst that can promote a particular chemical reaction (the reaction mechanisms for most of these things have been known for decades), but a combination of catalyst+stabilizer+reaction conditions that provide decent yields at reasonable costs.
In this particular case, electrolysis of water takes place as two half reactions: a hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and an oxygen evolution reaction (OER). While the reactions must take place simultaneously, they are nonetheless fundamentally different reactions that take place at the cathode and anode, respectively. The HER is relatively facile, but the OER is much more thermodynamically unfavorable. Different catalysts are used at the cathode and anode to promote these two half reactions, but the problem usually resides with the OER. To get good OER catalysis using cost-effective materials, you usually need to perform the reaction under alkaline conditions. But under alkaline conditions the HER takes a major hit, both uncatalyzed and using common catalysts, such as platinum. A nice review here,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
So there you go, that's the basic problem that this group is trying to solve. Haven't looked at the article carefully, but looks promising.