When there's a good idea around, there's more than one person pursuing it. And so it turns out that the artificial photosynthesis we covered recently isn't the only approach being pursued to produce hydrogen using only water and sunlight. A team of scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University and others at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) are also working on a method to generate hydrogen from water using sunlight.

This form of photo-electrochemical (PEC) water splitting uses molybdenum sulfide as a catalyst rather than platinum.  Platinum has been known to work as a catalyst for PEC water splitting, but it is also a particularly rare and expensive mineral, which makes it problematic for widespread use. In addition to developing an inexpensive catalyst, the research has also worked on light absorbers to capture as much light energy as possible.

"The experimental researchers at DTU designed light absorbers that consist of silicon arranged in closely packed pillars, and dotted the pillars with tiny clusters of the molybdenum sulfide. When they exposed the pillars to light, hydrogen gas bubbled up—as quickly as if they'd used costly platinum," according to a press release.

Most hydrogen currently used in industrial and vehicular uses comes from processing natural gas to create hydrogen. This is, of course, a carbon emitting process, and does not offer a sustainable method to develop a hydrogen-based infrastructure for power and/or transportation. But, if any of these current methods turns out to be affordable, scalable, and safe, then the hydrogen future may be more than just a fanciful idea.

via: DOE Energy Blog

Synthetic photosynthesis has been around for more than a decade. Early versions were costly and short-lived, which made them impractical for any real-world application. Now, an MIT research team has developed a method of artificial photosynthesis to create and store energy, with 10 times the efficiency of plant photosynthesis.

The process is similar to plant-photosynthesis, but while plants store energy as sugars, this process uses the elemental hydrogen and oxygen as stored fuel. This makes it possible to have a solar power system that works beyond just the times when the sun is shining. As the inventor, Dr. Daniel Nocera of MIT says of the process, "Sunlight plus water equals fuel." Instead of trying to directly generate electric power, as with solar cells, this technology breaks down water into hydrogen and oxygen, which can be stored until needed and then be fed back into a fuel cell to produce electricity when it is needed.

The components needed for the catalysts used in this process are also abundantly available and inexpensive, nickel and cobalt, rather than relying on costly and difficult-to-obtain exotic minerals, which should also help with the scaling of the technology to commercial production levels. The process is simple enough that it can be done in a glass of water at room temperature which also helps simplify development.

Having a distributed and widely available source of hydrogen production could also help in advancing a hydrogen energy infrastructure and in making hydrogen powered vehicles a more reasonable transportation solution for the future.

link: Sun Catalytix

via: Geek.com (no relationship to EcoGeek)