Profitable extraction of hydrogen from water thanks to a cactus?

Over a hundred years ago, it was discovered how to extract hydrogen gas from water. Hydrogen is a highly desired clean energy source that has been dubbed “the fuel of the future.” Despite that progress, hydrogen has not established itself as the dominant fuel source. No cost-effective methods of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen were found. As a result, the best-known transformation process, electrolysis, has been lacking in practical utility for large-scale commercial use. Solar energy has projected a ray of hope in this regard, but there is still ground to be covered in this line of research and development.

Now, the team of Navid Attarzadeh and Ramana Chintalapalle, both from the Center for Advanced Materials Research at the University of Texas at El Paso, have devised a low-cost nickel-based material to help break down water. cheaper and more efficiently. The inspiration for the design was a desert cactus.

Electrolysis is the process of splitting water into its two components using electricity and a catalyst, a material that speeds up a chemical reaction. Current techniques for breaking down water using electricity rely heavily on platinum as a catalyst, which is commercially unfeasible given how expensive the metal is.

A catalyst is needed that is economically viable enough that all nations can use it to extract hydrogen and use it as a clean energy source.

Attarzadeh and his colleagues began working on possible ways to use nickel as a catalytic substitute for platinum, since it is a thousand times cheaper than platinum. Nickel has promising properties, but as such it is too inefficient to use as a catalyst in hydrogen extraction.

Navid Attarzadeh (left) and Ramana Chintalapalle. (Photo: The University of Texas at El Paso. )

The inspiration to improve nickel came from a cactus of the Opuntia genus, which happened to be present on the path that took Attarzadeh to his laboratory every day. What most caught his attention about the cactus was how large its leaves and fruits are compared to those of other desert plants; this cactus has an extraordinary surface area.

It was then that Attarzadeh had an idea. What if they designed a 3D nickel-based catalyst in the shape of the cactus? The increased surface area could allow more room for conversion by chemical reaction, and thus increase the extraction of hydrogen, well above the extraction that nickel as such can achieve.

The team quickly designed the structure at the nanometer scale, invisible to the human eye, and tested the material, with very good results. The system still needs to be refined, but the direction to follow is already clear and it is only a matter of time before electrolysis in this way will be a profitable process to obtain hydrogen.

Attarzadeh and his colleagues report the technical details of their achievement in the academic journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, under the title “Nature-Inspired Design of Nano-Architecture-Aligned Ni5P4-Ni2P/NiS Arrays for Enhanced Electrocatalytic Activity of Hydrogen Evolution Reaction ( HER)”. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)