A new material that transforms into 5 shows us a new way of production renewable energy. If you were surprised by what we told you about the world’s largest blue and green renewable energy plant, you can’t miss what comes next. Energy has a lot to do with what is happening with climate change and the solution to end it.
Burning fossil fuels is done to obtain electricity and heat. However, their benefits are not enough to offset the large amount of greenhouse gases they emit. Tierra. Coal, oil and gas are identified as the main causes of global climate change.
To avoid the devastating negative impacts of climate change, we must reduce emissions and reach net zero. Several countries are already working, through well-defined objectives, to achieve this. The strategy? Replace polluting fuels with others that do not pollute, or at least reduce their carbon footprint.
A new way to obtain this renewable energy that you know very well
In this context, researchers from the University of Twente (UT) have developed a new material to make green hydrogen. It is a material with five transition metals that replace platinum or iridium in electrolyzers.
It performs one or two orders of magnitude better than individual compounds. It is composed of various abundant elements of the Tierra that could be used for the efficient production of green hydrogen without rare and precious metals such as platinum. The findings of his research found their place in the scientific journal ACS Nano.
Many see green hydrogen as the energy carrier of the future. In fact, it offers a way to store green energy for a longer period of time, an aspect that makes it relevant to produce effectively. There are several ways to generate green H, but water electrolysis is one of the most sustainable.
However, the methods used so far require strange and expensive materials, or simply do not provide very efficient processes.
“Currently, the most efficient electrolyzers contain platinum and iridium, which are needed for the electrodes that produce hydrogen and oxygen gas from water. However, platinum and especially iridium are too rare. “Therefore, we are constantly looking for electrode materials made from more abundant raw materials that can also be used as efficient and stable electrocatalysts,” he said. Chris Baemerresearcher at the UT.
Renewable energy: creating green hydrogen in the least expected way
The team found exactly what they were looking for in a new material consisting of five different transition metals. These five metals are active individually and only moderately active when used as catalysts.
Furthermore, it was found that the combined activity is up to 680 times higher than that of the individual compounds.
This was the explanation of Baemer: “We expected that the stability would improve compared to traditional connections, but when we started testing it quickly became apparent that the activity was also much higher. In collaboration with our partners Karlsruhe (Germany) j Berkley (EE. UU.), we discovered that individual transition metals can ‘help’ each other to make the combined material better than the sum of its parts in the so-called synergy effect.”
Forecast of this renewable energy
“We are comparing a newly discovered compound to materials optimized for large-scale production, which means our new material still needs to be tested on an industrial scale. However, with some adjustments and more research, this combination of transition metals has the potential to outperform currently available alternatives,” warns the postdoc of UT Shu Niwho is at the forefront of these developments.
The discoveries about this renewable energy They do not mean that we can immediately replace all electrodes with this material. This is a complex combination and has only been tested in a laboratory so far. If you want to know more about green hydrogen, don’t miss this article.