Posted on 09/14/2021 7:28:11 AM PDT by Red Badger
Researchers at the University of Central Florida have designed for the first time a nanoscale material that can efficiently split seawater into oxygen and a clean energy fuel — hydrogen.
The material offers the high performance and stability needed for industrial-scale electrolysis, which could produce a clean energy fuel from seawater.
Hydrogen fuel derived from the sea could be an abundant and sustainable alternative to fossil fuels, but the potential power source has been limited by technical challenges, including how to practically harvest it.
Researchers at the University of Central Florida have designed for the first time a nanoscale material that can efficiently split seawater into oxygen and a clean energy fuel — hydrogen. The process of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen is known as electrolysis and effectively doing it has been a challenge until now.
The stable, and long-lasting nanoscale material to catalyze the reaction, which the UCF team developed, is explained this month in the journal Advanced Materials.
“This development will open a new window for efficiently producing clean hydrogen fuel from seawater,” says Yang Yang, an associate professor in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center and study co-author.
Hydrogen is a form of renewable energy that—if made cheaper and easier to produce—can have a major role in combating climate change, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Hydrogen could be converted into electricity to use in fuel cell technology that generates water as product and makes an overall sustainable energy cycle, Yang says.
How It Works The researchers developed a thin-film material with nanostructures on the surface made of nickel selenide with added, or “doped,” iron and phosphor. This combination offers the high performance and stability that are needed for industrial-scale electrolysis but that has been difficult to achieve because of issues, such as competing reactions, within the system that threaten efficiency.
The new material balances the competing reactions in a way that is low-cost and high-performance, Yang says.
Using their design, the researchers achieved high efficiency and long-term stability for more than 200 hours.
“The seawater electrolysis performance achieved by the dual-doped film far surpasses those of the most recently reported, state-of-the-art electrolysis catalysts and meets the demanding requirements needed for practical application in the industries,” Yang says.
The researcher says the team will work to continue to improve the electrical efficiency of the materials they’ve developed. They are also looking for opportunities and funding to accelerate and help commercialize the work.
Reference: “Dual-Doping and Synergism toward High-Performance Seawater Electrolysis” by Jinfa Chang, Guanzhi Wang, Zhenzhong Yang, Boyang Li, Qi Wang, Ruslan Kuliiev, Nina Orlovskaya, Meng Gu, Yingge Du, Guofeng Wang and Yang Yang, 8 July 2021, Advanced Materials. DOI: 10.1002/adma.202101425
More About The Team
Co-authors included Jinfa Chang, a postdoctoral scholar, and Guanzhi Wang, a doctoral student in materials science engineering, both with UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center; and Ruslan Kuliiev ’20MS, a graduate of UCF’s Master’s in Aerospace Engineering program, and Nina Orlovskaya, an associate professor with UCF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Renewable Energy and Chemical Transformation Cluster.
Yang holds joint appointments in UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, which is part of the university’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of UCF’s Renewable Energy and Chemical Transformation (REACT) Cluster. He also holds a secondary joint-appointment in UCF’s Department of Chemistry. Before joining UCF in 2015, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. He received his doctorate in materials science from Tsinghua University in China.
Free Energy Ping!......................
The radical enviromentalists will find many reasons to oppose this form of energy. For them it is about controlling our lives.
Oh sure. Then what happens when we ruin all the seawater? It’s bad enough that ships crush so much seawater everyday. Makes me want to hug a stone crab or something. 😲
The article didn’t address the problem that sea water is more than just pure H2O. Sea water in particular has a lot of minerals and salts.
This material will be in clot shots next week.
Nobody will pay extra for clean.
They want cheap energy, and they can’t do that without subsidies. If there are subsidies, then it isn’t economically feasible or cheap.
[Think ethanol from corn in your gasoline. It doesn’t work without subsidies; and even then it’s not as good.]
So the new wonder material only costs $10,000 per ounce to make?
What happens to the earth when we have tens of millions of pounds of these “nano-scale” materials set loose?
The author says the scientists “achieved long-term stability for more than 200 hours.” TWO HUNDRED hours is “long term”? Have they bothered to calculate the number of hours in a year (8,760)? A commercial system will have to run 75% to 80% of the time year after year without breaking down. That’s about 7,000 hours per year of run-time with the other 1,760 hours set aside for unplanned and planned maintenance outages.
I wish them luck, but it’s a long, tough chemical and mechanical engineering journey from lab-scale to highly reliable, economical, commercial scale.
Ya, I’ve been waiting for them to start screaming about electric pickups killing the planet.
Earlier today, it was reported that Spain’s power costs today are 250% of what they were a few years ago. The Spaniards are not happy campers today.
People are all for “green” power until they find out it is very expensive and not reliable. Then they quickly change their tune. Except for power engineers, few people understand what the power industry is like and they really don’t understand power economics and how to design reliable, economical systems.
People tend to believe that we can magically “go green,” not produce any CO2, and not have to pay more for power. Most people are idiots (FReepdom excluded, of course).
And just exactly where does the energy come from to drive the electrolysis in the first place - cold fusion?
Makes me want to cook a stone crab or something!😎..................
E-Cat.......................
Why would it have to be seawater? Any kind of water, including sewage effluent, should be able to provide the basic requirement, that the water be able to be ionized, and that the portion of the water NOT ionized can wash away the other impurities not involved in the electrolysis process.
It should not be too hard to construct a large-scale storage unit, that uses a membrane not easily permeable to hydrogen gas, and collect the hydrogen within the membrane, which is deflated at the beginning. As the membrane is filled, it is constrained within a larger container that keeps the membrane from simply inflating like a balloon and floating away.
The other product of this electrolysis, free oxygen, would have to be discharged at some point relatively remote from the hydrogen generation site, and in itself may be a valuable by-product of this process.
But as nearly as I can tell, this process is going to have to have some source of electric current, to initiate the process. Or is this just some variation of a “perpetual motion” machine?
Oh, no! This is from seawater, so it just has to be cheap! / off SARC
Like the seasons changing with the earth’s orbit, periodically we have people inventing a new Perpetual Motion Machine.
LAST WEEK................
Fires, that's what.
Irony happens.
They are expensive to build, but CA can afford more than what is current if the politicians were forward thinking and not obsessed with freebees for the "gimmedats". Without googling, I think there are 3. Then you have lakes and river systems for landlocked areas.
It could be possible that this new technology could pay for building more desalination facilities. Of course, the fossil fuel industry would fight it, even though we would still need petroleum for its by-products that are used in countless products. Think plastic.
Then there is the problem with the hydrogen fuel cells in vehicles. I'm not sure if that has been perfected as yet.
“They are expensive to build...(Desalination plants)”
~~~
How expensive are they to run?
How much energy do you have to invest per each mole of hydrogen to get pure H2O and then to separate it from oxygen?
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