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Hydrogen is an incredibly powerful fuel, and the ingredients are everywhere in plain old water. Researchers would love to be able to use it widely as a clean and sustainable energy source.
One catch, however, is that a considerable amount of energy is required to split water and make hydrogen. Thus scientists have been working on fabricating materials for photoelectrodes that can use solar energy to split water, creating a solar fuel that can be stored for later use.
Scientists with the University of Chicago, the University of Madison-Wisconsin and Brookhaven National Laboratory published a new breakthrough in making such photoelectrodes. Their research, reported in
Credit: University of Warwick
Flash sintering is a ceramic processing technique which uses electric current to intensively heat the ceramic sample internally rather than using only external furnace heating. The process can lower ceramic processing temperatures and durations significantly, enabling ceramics to be co-processed with metals or other materials, and reducing energy use.
However, the process can result in low quality ceramics due to weaknesses caused by inhomogeneities in the microstructure.
The origins of these inhomogeneities caused by thermal gradients in the material during flash sintering have been studied by researchers based at WMG, University of Warwick and academic and industrial collaborators, and routes to mitigate the effects of these gradients are outlined.
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VIDEO: SLAC and Stanford researcher Will Chueh talks about a new way to incorporate scientific insight into machine learning for battery research - an approach that will speed up development of. view more
Credit: Olivier Bonin/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Menlo Park, Calif. Scientists have taken a major step forward in harnessing machine learning to accelerate the design for better batteries: Instead of using it just to speed up scientific analysis by looking for patterns in data, as researchers generally do, they combined it with knowledge gained from experiments and equations guided by physics to discover and explain a process that shortens the lifetimes of fast-charging lithium-ion batteries.
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IMAGE: A cross-sectional image of selective hydrogen gas permeation in a super hydrophobic membrane formed on a porous tubular support. view more
Credit: Picture courtesy: Yuji Iwamoto from Nagoya Institute of Technology
Hydrogen has been hailed as the fuel of the future owing to several reasons. First, compared to the conventionally used hydrocarbons, hydrogen exhibits higher energy yield. Second, the commercial use of hydrogen fuel, which yields only water as a byproduct product, would help mitigate the imminent global warming crisis by reducing the use of exhaustible and polluting fossil fuels. Thus, ongoing research has been focusing on efficient and environment-friendly ways to produce of hydrogen fuel.