UH team develops fast, cost-efficient method to grow OER catalyst for seawater splitting
A team of researchers led by Zhifeng Ren, director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston, has developed an oxygen-evolving catalyst that takes just minutes to grow at room temperature on commercially available nickel foam.
Paired with a previously reported hydrogen evolution reaction catalyst, it can achieve industrially required current density for overall seawater splitting at low voltage. The work is described in a paper published in the RSC journal
Energy & Environmental Science.
Developing energy- and time-saving methods to synthesize active and stable oxygen evolving catalysts is of great significance to hydrogen production from water electrolysis, which however remains a grand challenge. Here we report a one-step approach to grow highly porous S-doped Ni/Fe (oxy)hydroxide catalysts on Ni foam in several minutes under room temperature.
He added that quick, inexpensive production is highly significant for commercialization.
Ren’s team of researchers and others have earlier reported a nickel-iron-(oxy)hydroxide compound as a catalyst to disintegrate seawater. However, generating the material demanded a long process at temperatures ranging between 300 °C and 600 °C, or as high as 1,100 °F.
Due to the high energy cost, it was not viable for commercial use, and the high temperatures deteriorated the mechanical and structural integrity of the nickel foam, which made long-term stability a concern, stated Ren, who is also an M.D. Anderson Professor of physics at UH.
To tackle both stability and cost, the team developed a process to make use of nickel-iron-(oxy) hydroxide on nickel foam that is doped with a small amount of sulfur to generate an effective catalyst at room temperature in just 5 minutes. Since the catalyst works at room temperature, both the cost is reduced and the mechanical stability is enhanced, not
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New Catalyst Moves Seawater Desalination, Hydrogen Production Closer to Commercialization
A team of researchers led by Zhifeng Ren, director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH, has reported an oxygen evolving catalyst that takes just minutes to grow at room temperature and is capable of efficiently producing both clean drinking water and hydrogen from seawater.
Seawater makes up about 96% of all water on earth, making it a tempting resource to meet the world’s growing need for clean drinking water and carbon-free energy. And scientists already have the technical ability to both desalinate seawater and split it to produce hydrogen, which is in demand as a source of clean energy.
The finding raises troubling questions about how to effectively eliminate the poison from children’s bodies.
The battery recycling industry is responsible for much of the lead soil contamination in poor and middle-income countries.
Decades after the industrialized world largely eliminated lead poisoning in children, the potent neurotoxin still lurks in one in three children globally.
“Once the lead is in the environment, it stays there pretty much indefinitely without remediation,” says study lead author Jenna Forsyth, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “Ultimately, we want to work toward a world in which battery recycling is done safely, and lead never makes it into the soil or people’s bodies in the first place.”