How does a photon of visible light turn into an atom of hydrogen?
Same way water turns into wine............ST. Algore.........
It doesn’t. But your commentary on the inability of reporters to generate a meaningful headline is duly noted.
A research group headed by Professor of Electrical Engineering Craig Grimes at Penn State University is developing an inexpensive and easily scalable technique for water photoelectrolysis—the splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen using light energy.
Just accept it.
All green plants do this via photosynthesis. They use sunlight to split water into Hydrogen and Oxygen. The plants want to keep the Hydrogen to make carbohydrates and release the Oxygen back into nature.
Right now, hydrolysis--breaking up water molecules--requires more electricity than it's worth. But if we can ever imitate plants with a semi-efficient way to use sunlight to break out Hydrogen from water (and release Oxygen as a byproduct) it would be world-changing.
By interacting with a photo-reactive catalyst which goes on to dissociate water atoms.
They are not creating hydrogen from light, they are using the light to break the hydrogen-oxygen bonds in water to create free hydrogen and oxygen.
One then vents the oxygen and captures the hydrogen for fuel.
It appears to be a photovoltaic cell who's output current is used to directly break the hydrogen oxygen bond of water (electrolysis). Which begs the question of separating the two gasses as they are evolved and storing them under pressure.
Regards,
GtG