Posted on 07/03/2020 2:44:20 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Ning Yan and co-workers grew their nanogardens on a cloth consisting of carbon fibers of around 10 micrometers in diameter, a common electrode material in the fuel cell and electrolyser industries. The gardening started with depositing a layer of "soil" by hydrothermally encapsulating the fibers with a dense layer of cobalt hydroxide. This layer increased the structural stability of the nanostructures. Through variation of the ion concentration and temperature, they were able to induce the "sprouting" of grass-like features that are strongly "rooted" in the soil.
These grasses have an average length of 1.5 mm and a thickness of around 100 nm. To add blossoms and leaves to the grassy features, the researchers applied an electrodeposition method. In a diluted solution, electrodeposition dominantly proceeds from the tip of the grass stem, where the small radius of curvature results in a higher space charge density. In more concentrated solutions, the electrodeposition mainly proceeds from the bottom of the stems. This results in the deposition of "leafy" features, which in fact are interwoven dendritic deposit structures.
After converting the cobalt hydroxide nanostructures to cobalt phosphide by means of phosphidation, the researchers evaluated their catalytic activity in a setting that adequately represented industrially relevant conditions. As it turned out, the performance of the catalyst in an acidic environment is among the best of today's superior non-precious metal catalysts for hydrogen evolution. Furthermore, in acidic as well as alkaline and neutral conditions, the flowery nanofeatures resulted in significantly larger turnover frequencies than the leafy features, particularly at higher overpotentials when hydrogen evolution is influenced by mass transport limitations. The researchers attribute this to the geometry of the nanofeatures where the flowers enable smoother unloading of hydrogen.
...[T]he researchers showed that their nanogardens not only catalyze the hydrogen evolution reaction but also the oxygen evolution.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Did you miss the keyword there? It is “simple.” Duh!
Cool.
Are they going to put these nano-structures on our cars so they can run on hydrogen?
Does the process serve to fill my hydrogen car fuel tank?
Ha.... ha.... ha.... ha.... ha.... ha.... ha.... ha.... ha.... ha.... ha.... ha.... ha.... ha.... ha
Sheesh... leave it to modern society to complicate a relatively simple process.
Is this the same swamp gas that generates UFOs?
So they made a Chia Pet?
together with co-workers from the School of Physics and Technology at Wuhan University, China.
Land of virus.
Well, this outcome was so *obvious*. /jk
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