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John Lemke

New, inexpensive production materials boost promise of hydrogen fuel (Feb. 21, 2014) - 0 views

www.news.wisc.edu/22583

2014 production hydrogen fuel LL-Pub

shared by John Lemke on 26 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The trouble with solar fuel production is the cost of producing the sun-capturing semiconductors and the catalysts to generate fuel. The most efficient materials are far too expensive to produce fuel at a price that can compete with gasoline.
  • "In order to make commercially viable devices for solar fuel production, the material and the processing costs should be reduced significantly while achieving a high solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency," says
  • Choi and postdoctoral researcher Tae Woo Kim combined cheap, oxide-based materials to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases using solar energy with a solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency of 1.7 percent, the highest reported for any oxide-based photoelectrode system.
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  • "Without fancy equipment, high temperature or high pressure, we made a nanoporous semiconductor of very tiny particles that have a high surface area," says Choi, whose work is supported by the National Science Foundation. "More surface area means more contact area with water, and, therefore, more efficient water splitting."
  • "Since no one catalyst can make a good interface with both the semiconductor and the water that is our reactant, we choose to split that work into two parts," Choi says. "The iron oxide makes a good junction with bismuth vanadate, and the nickel oxide makes a good catalytic interface with water. So we use them together." The dual-layer catalyst design enabled simultaneous optimization of semiconductor-catalyst junction and catalyst-water junction.
  • In a study published last week in the journal Science, Choi and postdoctoral researcher Tae Woo Kim combined cheap, oxide-based materials to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases using solar energy with a solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency of 1.7 percent, the highest reported for any oxide-based photoelectrode system.
  • John Lemke on 26 Feb 14
     
    I am an advocate of switching to hydrogen for combustion engines.  One of the best reasons is that combustion produces water.  Furthermore, it is much safer than most people believe.  (Your car is not going to turn into the Hindenburg.) In Ben Bova's Book "Break Throughs" he talked of huge floating solar powered hydrogen producing plants.  In Room's "The Hype About Hydrogen" he painfully points out that H2 production is still not cost effective enough to complete with Gasoline.  That said, research like this leaves us hope for the future.
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