Researchers and scientists are always trying to find new ways to make clean energy more accessible and realistic to take the world off of coal and oil. The latest development comes from Washington State University. Researchers from WSU have developed a way to generate hydrogen from water more efficiently. This development is a big step towards making clean energy more feasible for every day and large-scale applications.

WSU researchers have found a way to create large amounts of inexpensive nanofoam catalysts that can facilitate the generation of hydrogen on a large scale by splitting water molecules. Source: Washington State University

One of the major issues that people have with renewable energy is that the major sources, wind and solar, only produce energy sporadically. Because of this, energy conversion and energy storage are two major challenges of clean energy. Researchers have found that they can take the excess energy produced and use it to split water into oxygen and hydrogen to store the energy. Hydrogen has proven to be very promising for renewable energy.

The water splitting process seems great but it hasn’t been a popular method in the renewable energy community. This is because expensive precious metals, like platinum or ruthenium, are typically used to make the metal catalysts. Another reason why water splitting hasn’t caught on is that it can sometimes cause the catalyst materials break down quickly or the method uses too much energy. The new method from WSU aims to change this with their new method.

The new method only takes five minutes but manages to create large amounts of the catalysts that are main components of the chemical reaction to split water to create hydrogen energy. The method is inexpensive because it uses nickel and iron, two cheap materials. The team used these materials to create porous nanofoam. It has the ability to capture the reaction while using less energy because it is very similar to a tiny sponge. The nanofoam has a distinct atomic structure and, combined with the exposed surfaces, it is much more efficient than precious metal catalysts that are used today because it can capture the energy reaction and use less energy. In testing, the catalyst had little loss in activity over 12 hours.

The next step for the researchers is to start testing for this method for large-scale applications.

The paper on this method was published in Nano Energy.