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Current hydrogen production uses intense heat to separate hydrogen from hydrocarbons found in crude oil. An alternate process, capturing hydrogen in water, is cleaner and more sustainable. The new material could make hydrogen capture more commercially viable and provide a key element for a new generation of cheaper, lightweight hydrogen fuel cells.
Current hydrogen production uses intense heat to separate hydrogen from hydrocarbons found in crude oil. An alternate process, capturing hydrogen in water, is cleaner and more sustainable. The new material could make hydrogen capture more commercially viable and provide a key element for a new generation of cheaper, lightweight hydrogen fuel cells.
Current hydrogen production uses intense heat to separate hydrogen from hydrocarbons found in crude oil. An alternate process, capturing hydrogen in water, is cleaner and more sustainable. The new material could make hydrogen capture more commercially viable and provide a key element for a new generation of cheaper, lightweight hydrogen fuel cells.
Professor of Chemistry and director of UConn's Institute of Materials Science. "Our results show that this material is more than competitive with the state-of-the-art materials quoted in literature, and exceptionally good for the reactions we need." Current hydrogen production uses intense heat to separate hydrogen from hydrocarbons found in crude oil. But the resulting hydrogen isn't very pure, and byproducts must be scrubbed out. An alternate process, capturing hydrogen in water, is cleaner and more sustainable, but it too has Cover of the March 2016 Advanced Materials journal. limitations. Electrocatalysts involved in this process (A.M. El-Sawy et al., Oxygen Reactions: Controlling the are usually made of rare earth metals like platinum Active Sites of Sulfur-Doped Carbon and iridium. But they are very expensive, making NanotubeGraphene Nanolobes for Highly Efficient the commercialization of pure hydrogen fuels Oxygen Evolution and Reduction Catalysis, Credit: difficult. Advanced Energy Materials, 2016, Vol. 6, no. 5. WileyVCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA. Reproduced with permission
A team of UConn chemists led by professors
Steven Suib and James Rusling has developed a new material that could make hydrogen capture more commercially viable and provide a key element for a new generation of cheaper, lightweight hydrogen fuel cells.
Finding a non-metal catalyst that has all of the
electrochemical properties of the rare earth metals but can be made at a much reduced cost and still remain stable has been a goal of scientists for years.
Suib and Rusling, an expert in electrochemistry,
knew that sulfur-infused carbon graphene nanotubes were a potentially efficient non-metal catalyst for an oxygen reduction reaction. An oxygen reduction reaction, or ORR, happens when The new metal-free catalyst uses carbon graphene oxygen and hydrogen molecules are converted to water. The reaction is a key component of nanotubes infused with sulfur. hydrogen-based fuel cells. Hydrogen gas used to power the cells passes through a catalyst, currently Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and a promising source for clean energy. a corrosive-resistant metal like platinum, causing an oxygen reduction electrochemical reaction that But producing high-grade hydrogen is an expensive and energy-consuming process. Often, creates energy and as a byproduct water. the energy spent extracting hydrogen is worth more than the hydrogen gas it produces. Finding a But reversing that process starting with water and extracting pure hydrogen from it, a procedure cheaper and more efficient way of capturing hydrogen would go a long way toward the creation known as an oxygen evolution reaction is much more of a challenge electrochemically. Suib and of a sustainable hydrogen economy, and would Rusling, working with a team of graduate students help reduce the world's reliance on fossil fuels. led by Ph.D. candidates Abdelhamid El-Sawy and Islam Mosa, decided to give it a shot. "We've made a material that looks pretty good,"
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The key, Suib says, was manipulating the sulfur
characterize the new material as it developed in the and carbon atoms to create stable bonds and lab, Suib says. structures within the nanotubes, while also maintaining or improving the tubes' electrochemical potential so that it mirrored those found in the rare metals. "If you are going to make a hydrogen economy, you need to have new materials that do the same thing as the extremely expensive rare earth metals," says Suib. "But how do you get something that is cheap, durable, and stable enough to be scaled up to industry levels? That was our challenge." The process developed in Suib's and Rusling's labs uses a dual doping procedure involving sulfur and benzyl disulfide treated at high heat. The researchers had to carefully add heteroatoms of sulfur at extremely low levels to strike the delicate balance needed to maintain usability and stability. Add too much sulfur and the sample would be unstable; not enough and it would be ineffective. Suib says the procedure for isolating hydrogen in water, in a very general way, is similar to trying to separate flour and sand after they've been mixed together thoroughly. In the end, he says, the sulfur-doped nanotubes used much less energy in the chemical reaction process than other known processes, and were much more active and efficient catalysts than other known products. Most importantly, he points out, the sulfur-infused nanotubes are efficient for both separating hydrogen from water and reducing oxygen into water. Materials with those dual properties are rare, he notes. "I was surprised, in the end, that it worked so well," Suib says, with a grin. "We thought it might work, but we didn't think it would work so well." Powerful transmission electron microscopes and scanning electron microscopes in UConn's Bioscience Electron Microscopy Lab, Institute of Materials Science, and new FEI Center for Advanced Microscopy and Materials Analysis were instrumental in helping researchers test and
DAV CENTENARY PUBLIC SCHOOL, PASCHIM ENCLAVE, NEW DELHI-87
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