New Catalyst Boosts Hydrogen Fuel Tech (IMAGE)
Caption
A team of researchers have engineered a cheap, abundant alternative to the expensive catalyst platinum and coupled it with a light-absorbing electrode to make hydrogen fuel from sunlight and water. The discovery was published in Nature Materials by theorist Jens Nørskov of the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University and a team of colleagues led by Ib Chorkendorff and Søren Dahl at the Technical University of Denmark. The team optimized a photo-electrochemical water splitting device by designing light absorbers made of silicon arranged in closely packed pillars, imaged above using a scanning electron microscope. After dotting the pillars with tiny clusters of the new catalyst and exposing the pillars to light, researchers watched as hydrogen gas bubbled up -- as quickly as if they'd used costly platinum.
Credit
Image courtesy of Christian D. Damsgaard, Thomas Pedersen and Ole Hansen, Technical University of Denmark.
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