Discovery of a highly efficient catalyst eases way to hydrogen economy

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://news.wisc.edu/24010

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Discovery of a highly efficient catalyst eases way to hydrogen economy[/font]

Sept. 14, 2015 | by David Tenenbaum

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In the online edition of Nature Materials that appears today, Jin's research team reports a hydrogen-making catalyst containing phosphorus and sulfur — both common elements — and cobalt, a metal that is 1,000 times cheaper than platinum.

Catalysts reduce the energy needed to start a chemical reaction. The new catalyst is almost as efficient as platinum and likely shows the highest catalytic performance among the non-noble metal catalysts reported so far, Jin reports.

The advance emerges from a long line of research in Jin's lab that has focused on the use of iron pyrite (fool's gold) and other inexpensive, abundant materials for energy transformation. Jin and his students Miguel Cabán-Acevedo and Michael Stone discovered the new high-performance catalyst by replacing iron to make cobalt pyrite, and then added phosphorus.

...

The new catalyst can also work with the energy from sunlight, Jin says. "We have demonstrated a proof-of-concept device for using this cobalt catalyst and solar energy to drive hydrogen generation, which also has the best reported efficiency for systems that rely only on inexpensive catalysts and materials to convert directly from sunlight to hydrogen."

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmat4410

[thecrow]

1. ! This sounds great !

[Kelvin Mace]

2. I read these claims about once a year

but none of them ever seem to come to market.