Zhenxing Feng is a professor at OSU. Credit: OSU
The design of catalysts has shown that hydrogen can be produced cleanly with much greater efficiency and at a lower cost than currently available catalysts.
A catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction.
The production of hydrogen is important for many aspects of our life, such as fuel cells for cars and the manufacture of many useful chemicals such as ammonia, said the OSU College of Engineering's Zhenxing Feng, a chemical engineering professor who led the research. It's also used in the refining of metals, for producing man-made materials such as plastics, and for a range of other purposes.
Producing hydrogen by splitting water is more sustainable and cleaner than the conventional method of making hydrogen from natural gas through a carbon-dioxide-production process. The cost of the technique has been a barrier to the marketplace.
The new findings describe ways to design catalysts that can greatly improve the efficiency of the clean hydrogen production process.
Structural changes are what catalysts experience in facilitating reaction processes. Sometimes the changes are irreversible and can lead to a loss of activity in the catalyst that lowers reaction efficiency.
A group of people, including a student at the Ohio State University, studied the restructuring of catalysts in reaction and then manipulated their surface structure and composition at the atomic scale to achieve a highly efficient catalytic process for producing hydrogen.
The active phase of a catalyst based on iridium oxide was close to three orders of magnitude better than the common commercial catalyst.
"We found two groups of materials that underwent irreversible changes that turned out to be better catalysts for hydrogen production." It can help us produce hydrogen at $2 per kilogram. The United States' goal of zero emissions will be achieved by using that process.
The Hydrogen Energy Earthshot target of cutting the cost of clean hydrogen by 80% is part of the US Department of Energy's Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office.
The water electrolysis technology uses electricity from renewable sources to split water and make clean hydrogen. He said that the efficiency of water splitting is low due to the high overpotential, which is the difference between the actual potential and the theoretical potential of an electrochemical reaction.
The water-splitting reaction can be promoted by lowering the overpotential and lowering the total cost for hydrogen production. Our first study in JACS Au laid the groundwork for us, and as demonstrated in our Science Advances article we now can better manipulate atoms on surface to design catalysts with the desired structure and composition.
Yubo Chen and his team at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that lattice site–dependent metal is leaching in perovskites towards a honeycomb-like water oxidation catalyst. Science.org has a DOI of/10.1126/sciadv.abk 1788.
The Restructuring-Induced CoOx Catalyst for Electrochemical Water Splitting is a paper by Maoyu Wang and his colleagues. jacsau.1c00346 is a book.
Science Advances has journal information.
Researchers develop advanced catalysts for clean hydrogen production on December 10, 2021.
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