New Catalyst Produced Cheap Hydrogen Fuel

"The Australian Government is interested in developing a hydrogen export industry to export our abundant renewable energy," said Professor O'Mullane from QUT's Science and Engineering Faculty.

"In principle, hydrogen offers a way to store clean energy at a scale that is required to make the rollout of large-scale solar and wind farms as well as the export of green energy viable.

"However, current methods that use carbon sources to produce hydrogen emit carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that mitigates the benefits of using renewable energy from the sun and wind.

"Electrochemical water splitting driven by electricity sourced from renewable energy technology has been identified as one of the most sustainable methods of producing high-purity hydrogen."

Professor O'Mullane said the new composite material he and PhD student Ummul Sultana had developed enabled electrochemical water splitting into hydrogen and oxygen using cheap and readily available elements as catalysts.

"Traditionally, catalysts for splitting water involve expensive precious metals such as iridium oxide, ruthenium oxide and platinum," he said.

"An additional problem has been stability, especially for the oxygen evolution part of the process.

"What we have found is that we can use two earth-abundant cheaper alternatives -- cobalt and nickel oxide with only a fraction of gold nanoparticles -- to create a stable bi-functional catalyst to split water and produce hydrogen without emissions.

"From an industry point of view, it makes a lot of sense to use one catalyst material instead of two different catalysts to produce hydrogen from water."

Professor O'Mullane said the stored hydrogen could then be used in fuel cells.

"Fuel cells are a mature technology, already being rolled out in many makes of vehicle. They use hydrogen and oxygen as fuels to generate electricity -- essentially the opposite of water splitting.

"With a lot of cheaply 'made' hydrogen we can feed fuel cell-generated electricity back into the grid when required during peak demand or power our transportation system and the only thing emitted is water."

Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adfm.201804361

Comments

Photovoltaics: Band Diagram

In the previous post we discussed silicon, which is the most used material in photovoltaics. In this post, we introduce the band diagram, for which we will use silicon as an example. We will start our discussion of the band diagram with the Bohr model of the silicon atom. In semiconductor materials the outer shell of the atom, which is called the valence shell, is not completely filled. The outer shell of silicon contains 4 out of the possible 8 electrons, which we call valence electrons. As we discussed in the previous post, each silicon atom in a crystalline structure is bonded to four other silicon atoms. The bonds between the silicon atoms are called covalent bonds. These bonds actually consist of two valence electrons that are shared by two silicon atoms. All valence electrons are fixed in the lattice, forming covalent bonds, and are therefore immobile. However, at a temperature above absolute zero, thermal energy is supplied to these miconductor and some of the vale

Solar Cells Losses and Design Part 1

We have discussed some important properties of light and characteristics of the radiation of light by our sun. In this post, we will focus on converting that light to electrical energy. This is done using the photovoltaic effect. Photovoltaics covers the direct conversion of sunlight into electrical energy, by a semiconductor material. The term photovoltaics is derived from the Greek word ‘phos’ which means light, and volt, which refers to electricity, specifically voltage. Volt is a reference to the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, who invented the battery photovoltaic effect that was discovered in 1839, by the French physicist Emond Becquerel. At the age of 19 Becquerel created the first photovoltaic cell by illuminating platinum electrodes, coated with silver chloride in an acid solution. This device was the first to convert light into electricity. The photovoltaic effect occurs through the generation of a potential difference at the junction of two different material

Black Carbon is Found in the Amazon River after Forest Fires

In addition to the tracks of destruction in the forest, the fires in the Amazon leave traces in the Amazon River and its tributaries. Incomplete burning of tree wood results in the production of a type of carbon - known as black carbon - that reaches Amazonian waters in the forms of charcoal and soot and is transported to the Atlantic Ocean as dissolved organic carbon. An international group of researchers quantified and characterized, for the first time, the black carbon that flows through the Amazon River. The results of the study, published in Nature Communications magazine, showed that most of the material transferred to the ocean is "young," suggesting that it was produced by recent forest fires. "We found through radiometric dating analysis [a method that uses the radioisotope of natural carbon-14 occurrence to determine the age of carbonaceous materials up to about 60,000 years] and molecular composition that the largest proportion of the black carbon we found

The Environmental Engineering Hub

Search This Blog