Hydrogen technology has been
promoted for decades but always ran head on into the intractable problem of
producing hydrogen itself from any source in a way that was cheap, let alone
ever cheaply splitting water.
Suddenly, though we had strong
indications about all this last year, we have a cheaply produced artificial
leaf that absorbs solar energy to split water and preferentially produce
hydrogen. This is good enough. Engineering solutions can now follow.
Hydrogen storage now becomes the
next bottleneck. A property happily
producing hydrogen that can be used for heating needs storage. Converting it into electrical power through a
fuel cell seems wasteful and an inconvenient step best avoided. Yet, for large installations it is an option.
I see this easily integrated with
solar cell technology were the usable solar portion differs from the usable hydrogen
portion. All sorts of clever adaptations
suggest themselves.
Scientists unveil 'world's first practical artificial leaf'
By Ben
Coxworth
18:02 March 28, 2011
Scientists unveil 'world's first practical artificial leaf'
Leaves – the kind that grow on trees – create energy from sunlight and
water through the process of photosynthesis. For over a decade, scientists have
been kicking around the idea of creating an "artificial leaf." Such a
device would use sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which could
then be stored in a fuel cell and used to create electricity. A functioning
artificial leaf has been created before, but was impractical due to
the fact that it was made from expensive materials, and was highly unstable.
Now, however, scientists are reporting that they have created a cost-effective,
stable artificial leaf.
"A practical artificial leaf has been one of the Holy Grails of
science for decades," said MIT's Dr. Daniel Nocera, who led the research team.
"We believe we have done it. The artificial leaf shows particular promise
as an inexpensive source of electricity for homes of the poor in developing
countries. Our goal is to make each home its own power station."
Nocera's leaf is about the size of a poker card (but thinner), and is
made of silicon, electronics, and nickel and cobalt catalysts – all materials
that are relatively inexpensive and widely-available. Placed in a gallon of
water in bright sunlight, it is said to be able to produce enough electricity
to supply a house in a developing country for a day. It would be connected to a
fuel cell located either on top of or beside the house.
When tested under laboratory conditions, it was able to operate
continuously for at least 45 hours without a drop in activity. Newly discovered nickel and cobalt catalysts are the
key to the leaf's practicality, allowing it to reportedly operate at ten
times the efficiency of a natural leaf. Nocera believes that the efficiency can
be boosted much higher in future versions and has founded a company
called Sun
Catalytix to pursue development of the technology.
John Turner of the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory created a
functioning artificial leaf over ten years ago, but it incorporated costly
metals, and barely lasted one day. More recently, Chinese scientists have
presented a design
for an artificial leaf that incorporated titanium dioxide and platinum, and
Dutch researchers created a light-capturing system based on the chlorophyll of the
alga Spirulina.
The MIT research was presented today at the 241st National Meeting of
the American Chemical Society in Anaheim ,
California
Nocera discusses the technology in the following video:
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