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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Rice University researchers have created an efficient, low-cost device that splits water to produce hydrogen fuel.
The platform developed by the Brown School of Engineering lab of Rice materials scientist Jun Lou integrates catalytic electrodes and perovskite solar cells that, when triggered by sunlight, produce electricity. The current flows to the catalysts that turn water into hydrogen and oxygen, with a sunlight-to-hydrogen efficiency as high as 6.7%.
This sort of catalysis isn't new, but the lab packaged a perovskite layer and the electrodes into a single module that, when dropped into water and placed in sunlight, produces hydrogen with no further input.
The platform introduced by Lou, lead author and Rice postdoctoral fellow Jia Liang and their colleagues in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano is a self-sustaining producer of fuel that, they say, should be simple to produce in bulk.
"The concept is broadly similar to an artificial leaf," Lou said. "What we have is an integrated module that turns sunlight into electricity that drives an electrochemical reaction. It utilizes water and sunlight to get chemical fuels."
More information: Jia Liang et al, A Low-Cost and High-Efficiency Integrated Device toward Solar-Driven Water Splitting, ACS Nano (2020). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.9b09053
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @12:24AM (1 child)
Can it, or cannot it produce more energy in its lifetime than gets spent producing it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 11 2020, @04:22AM
It probably can't, as that would make a mockery of thermodynamics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @12:47AM
Will they develop superpowers or will they fart hydrogen?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @02:23PM (1 child)
They claim 6.7% for this one.
Is that good or bad compared to nature?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday May 10 2020, @03:53PM
OK. Comment.
The process when I first heard about it over a decade ago was much less efficient than nature, but it produced "metabolites" desired by people rather than useful to the plant. Short chain hydrocarbons rather then starches and sugars.
So. This isn't new, it's part of continuing research. Perhaps they've gotten it far enough developed that it's worth industrial development rather than just research. And you can't compare efficiencies to "natural leaves" directly, because they aren't developing the same end products. If they've got something that's cheap and durable, it's a way to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and either sequester it or use it instead of more fossil carbon.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @05:09PM
hmmm... safe drinking water.
now i am not sure what concentration of salt in water is safe to drink for a long time. surely it is bigger then zero 'cause the stuff they pipe into your arm in the hospital sure has some salt in it?
anyway, point is that chlorine is a pretty good disinfectant and it's part of salt, natrium-chloride.
so have a pebble of this petrolsky :) in your pocket, add some salt to your dodgy water and add the pebble and dump (the hopefully UV transparent) pet bottle into the sun for a day. one would hope that the pebble (and the UV) will make the dodgy water a bit safer to drink (after removing the pebble)?
or does this only work to split hydrogen from oxygen and not chlorine and natrium?