IMAGE: Using a molybdenum based catalyst, hydrogen bubbles are made cheaply and at room temperature.
Posted on 04/14/2011 3:32:06 PM PDT by neverdem
Contact: Michael Mitchell
michael.mitchell@epfl.ch
41-798-103-107
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
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Producing hydrogen in a sustainable way is a challenge and production cost is too high. A team led by EPFL Professor Xile Hu has discovered that a molybdenum based catalyst is produced at room temperature, inexpensive and efficient. The results of the research are published online in Chemical Science Thursday the 14th of April. An international patent based on this discovery has just been filled.
Existing in large quantities on Earth, water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. It can be broken down by applying an electrical current; this is the process known as electrolysis. To improve this particularly slow reaction, platinum is generally used as a catalyst. However, platinum is a particularly expensive material that has tripled in price over the last decade. Now EPFL scientists have shown that amorphous molybdenum sulphides, found abundantly, are efficient catalysts and hydrogen production cost can be significantly lowered.
Industrial prospects
The new catalysts exhibit many advantageous technical characteristics. They are stable and compatible with acidic, neutral or basic conditions in water. Also, the rate of the hydrogen production is faster than other catalysts of the same price. The discovery opens up some interesting possibilities for industrial applications such as in the area of solar energy storage.
It's only by chance that Daniel Merki, Stéphane Fierro, Heron Vrubel and Xile Hu made this discovery during an electrochemical experience. "It's a perfect illustration of the famous serendipity principle in fundamental research", as Xile Hu emphasizes: "Thanks to this unexpected result, we've revealed a unique phenomenon", he explains. "But we don't yet know exactly why the catalysts are so efficient."
The next stage is to create a prototype that can help to improve sunlight-driven hydrogen production. But a better understanding of the observed phenomenon is also required in order to optimize the catalysts.
Links:
Laboratory of Inorganic Synthesis and Catalysis: http://lsci.epfl.ch/
Source: Daniel Merki, Stéphane Fierro, Heron Vrubel and Xile Hu, "Amorphous Molybdenum Sulfide Films as Catalysts for Electrochemical Hydrogen Production in Water," Chemical Science, 2011.
I made a chance discovery that could revolutionize methane production. Beer and Polish sausage.
So now we can sprint to a hydrogen economy and not have to worry anymore about progressives pleading for $8 a gallon gasoline?
At room temperature, no less. We’ve planned ahead with a substantial stock of #10 cans of B&M Baked Beans.
Oh somebody’s found a new catalyst. Whoopee. (sarc)
“It’s a perfect illustration of the famous serendipity principle in fundamental research”
Goodness.
Damn interesting,
Let me explain that “Goodness”. For some odd reason catalyst research seems to draw the most immature, in-love-with-themselves people.
I hate those catalyst guys. The only ones worse than middleware guys.
Don't forget to add pickled eggs.
Experience? LOL. We talking black lights and psilocybin? Just asking.
Seriesly, I have long envisioned a miracle catalyst the *might* lower the energy barrier for the disassociation of Hydrogen and Oxygen in water. Maybe drop the voltage req'd by 1/2 - 3/4 of a volt. Maybe.
It absolutely doesn't do anything for the prodigious and very predictable difficulties involved with the mass handling of hydrogen implied by the use of H2 as a widely-used fuel.
A cheaper catalyst that speeds the electrolysis process could be a useful discovery, but the article ignores the key fact in this area - hydrogen is an energy *carrier*, not an energy source.
You’ve got to put energy into the catalyst and water to get H2 out - that’s fine, but the energy is electricity, and electricity is an energy carrier, not an energy source as well. It’s going to come from coal, natural gas, nukes - maybe to some extent from solar (but I don’t expect that would be a major source for electricity for electrolysis).
When somebody comes up with the catalyst system that directly uses solar energy to cleave water to hydrogen and oxygen, then we’ll be in business.
Hydrolysis
How... Original
A catalyst might be useful to increase efficiency
but it still requires current, a lot of it
Only if you want hi-test.
Sounds great. My only question is: “Do you get more energy back when you recombine the oxygen and hydrogen than the energy it took to make, deliver, and utilize the electricity used during the “improved” hydrolysis?” If not, then who gives a crap.
The basic problem is the law of conservation of energy. Water is the combustion product of hydrogen and oxygen, a process that yields a substantial amount of energy in the form of heat. To revere the process one needs to put at least as much energy back in as came out. In fact, it’s usually a number of timds as much. Thus, all any catalyst can do is move the process closer to 100% efficiency.
It couldn't be "bottled" like other compressed gases?
Juice would come from conventional powers sources while they are idled so that subsidized renewables are fed into the grid. Those conventional power sources are required for backing up subsidized renewables at night or when the wind isn't blowing. Those conventional power sources are still required to meet peak loads. They can store energy as hydrogen when renewable sources are required by law.
Yes, it can. But;
Hydrogen, because it is the smallest molecule, has a pernicious tendency to find and leak out of the teensiest opening. Your plumbing has to be super-high quality or it will leak out.
It can be compressed (like almost any gas) and delivered in bottles like a scuba tank, but to liquefy hydrogen and REALLY get it small vs its gas phase volume, you must BOTH refrigerate AND compress it to a very high pressure. And that implies a boil-off mechanism in many cases.
It is considered somewhat dangerous because a hydrogen flame in air is colorless, practically invisible. Wikipedia has a pic of the space shuttle nozzle in ignition (runs on hydrogen) and you can see the flame is invisible for part of the feather.
The good news is that when it leaks, it floats up and dissipates quickly, vs propane, heavier than air, which has a nasty tendency to accumulate in low spots. That is by no means to say that parking garages wouldn’t potentially become rather dangerous under a hydrogen-fuel regime without drilling bazillions of vent holes in them.
It is a challenging gas to handle. It is almost inconceivable that a giant, mass-distribution system (like our nat’l network of gas pipelines) could exist at any efficient pressure level without lotsa leakage, each one of those leaks being a source of potentially dangerous explosive gas. It is not a gas that lends itself conveniently to the kind of connect-disconnect-connect * 100,000,000 situation of multiple-vehicle fueling situations because of its ability to find and leak out of any breach.
I was thinking more about "bottling" it for civilian vehicles. Pipelines would be limited to just local ones to fuel local gov't fleets, e.g. buses, garbage trucks, official vehicles, etc.
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