In recent years, hydrogen, as a potential clean energy, has attracted people's attention because it will not produce climate damaging emissions when burning. However, the traditional hydrogen production method has a huge carbon footprint, while the cleaning method is expensive and complex.
Now, researchers have reported a major progress, a double electrode catalyst, which relies on a compound to effectively generate hydrogen and oxygen from seawater and fresh water. Previous attempts to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen over this bifunctional catalyst have generally resulted in poor performance in one of these two functions. The use of two different catalysts is effective, but increases the cost of catalyst manufacturing.
Researchers from the University of Houston, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Central China Normal University reported their work in the journal Energy and Environmental Science. They used a nickel/molybdenum/nitrogen compound, which was adjusted with a small amount of iron, grew on foam nickel, effectively produced hydrogen, and then transformed into a compound that produced similar strong oxygen evolution reaction through the electrochemical reconstruction process triggered by the circulating voltage.
The researchers said that the simultaneous use of a compound in hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) - although slightly changed during reconstruction - not only made water decomposition more economical, but also simplified engineering challenges.
Most materials are good for HER or OER, but both reactions need to complete chemical reactions and generate hydrogen from water. Ren Zhifeng, director of the Superconductivity Research Center at the University of Texas, is one of the corresponding authors of this paper. He said that the new catalyst can not only be operated efficiently with a catalyst, but also be effective in seawater and fresh water. Compared with the existing catalysts, this is comparable to the good catalysts reported in history. (Test article)
