It’s more clear now than ever before that humanity must place higher importance on reducing our carbon footprint, and the quickest way to do that is to increase research into alternative energy generation methods. A team of scientists from Trinity College Dublin has recently published their work on a breakthrough that has major potential to lead us to completely renewable energy production. The paper was published in the journal, Nature Communications early last month.
The idea of using hydrogen as a renewable energy source has been around for decades, and a fair amount of progress has been made in hydrogen fuel cell technology, but one major issue has always loomed over this theory. That issue is the amount of energy that it takes to split water into its core components, 2 hydrogen atoms, and one oxygen atom. Alternatively, while sequestering hydrogen out of the atmosphere is possible, is an even more energy-demanding process. The solution to this issue is to use a catalyst in the form of a pure rare metal or metal alloy to break down water molecules, but the two metals that can efficiently do this are quite rare, and thus are very expensive making them not viable for commercial production processes.
Professor Max Garcia-Melchor and PhD Candidate, Michael Craig. Credit: Trinity College Dublin.
“Although certain elements are effective at splitting water, such as Ruthenium or Iridium (two of the so-called noble metals of the periodic table), these are prohibitively expensive for commercialization. Other, cheaper options tend to suffer in terms of their efficiency and/or their robustness. In fact, at present, nobody has discovered catalysts that are cost-effective, highly active and robust for significant periods of time,” the team of researchers said in a press release.
The key to splitting water molecules to produce hydrogen in an efficient manner will involve discovering new catalyst materials, but this could take years and untold amounts of funding in a laboratory setting. The team of chemists and physicists decided to let computers do all of the heavy lifting and have created powerful programs that accurately predict the efficiency of a water-splitting catalyst made up of different material combinations. These programs will combine materials in a simulation and determine if the resulting alloy has any water-splitting catalyst properties to it, and hopefully, the magic “Green Bullet” of catalyst alloy will be discovered without scientist having to perform thousands of physical experiments.
“The team aims to now use artificial intelligence to put a large number of earth-abundant metals and ligands (which glue them together to generate the catalysts) in a melting pot before assessing which of the near-infinite combinations yield the greatest promise,” the press release stated. “In combination, what once looked like an empty canvas now looks more like a paint-by-numbers as the team has established fundamental principles for the design of ideal catalysts.”
“Given the increasingly pressing need to find green energy solutions it is no surprise that scientists have, for some time, been hunting for a magical catalyst that would allow us to split water electrochemically in a cost-effective, reliable way,” Professor Max García-Melchor wrote in a statement. “However, it is no exaggeration to say that before now such a hunt was akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. We are not over the finishing line yet, but we have significantly reduced the size of the haystack and we are convinced that artificial intelligence will help us hoover up plenty of the remaining hay,” he continued. “This research is hugely exciting for a number of reasons and it would be incredible to play a role in making the world a more sustainable place. Additionally, this shows what can happen when researchers from different disciplines come together to apply their expertise to try to solve a problem that affects each and every one of us.”
I’ve written a lot of articles over the years on hydrogen-powered vehicles, and the one thing that always bugged me was their efficiency. The benefit of water being the only “Exhaust” byproduct of using hydrogen as a fuel is very exciting, but the amount of electricity that it took to produce enough hydrogen to fuel a vehicle always astonished me when compared to the efficiency of economy with petroleum-based vehicles. This tradeoff has lead me to discount hydrogen fuel cells in many of those articles, but if a new “super catalyst” is discovered that makes splitting water energy neutral, then hydrogen-powered vehicles and even power production stations could be the clean energy we have so desperately been searching for.
Source: Tcd.ie
