Urban Blog

A team of researchers at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have recently set up a new laboratory (the first in Asia) that will be used to convert water into hydrogen fuel.

As the scientists said, the development of this technology may reduce the cost of using  to the same price as using conventional energy sources.  The laboratory will use what is known as “artificial leaf” technology. It is inspired by the way leaves use sunlight to generate electricity.This technique will make possible the separation of water into oxygen and hydrogen. Large quantities of hydrogen can be produced in a clean and sustainable manner.

Conventional technologies are not so efficient because they require huge amounts of energy to extract only small amounts of hydrogen from water. The researchers want to test in the lab if cheap substances like titanium dioxide and rust can efficiently capture solar energy to split water. Currently, such extraction technologies are available, but the team wants to find cheaper ways.

“We can do this reaction right now. It’s no problem. We can use platinum, or we can use very expensive semi-conductor materials. The challenge is to devise a technology which is cheap, and is robust,” said professor James Barber, a leading expert in this field.

A system that converts the energy of sunlight directly into hydrogen has been discovered at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Scientists there have managed to design what they call a “biohybrid photoconversion system,” which consists in the interaction of plant proteins responsible with photosynthesis and a synthetic polymer they created.

The Light Harvesting Complex II proteins (LHC-II) in a spinach plant have been determined of being able to self-assemble with polymers in a synthetic membrane structure which can produce hydrogen from water in the presence of sunlight. The researchers used a technique called “small angle neutron scattering” at ORNL’s High Flux Isotope Reactor.

“Making a self-repairing msynthetic photoconversion syste is a pretty tall order. The ability to control structure and order in these materials for self-repair is of interest because, as the system degrades, it loses its effectiveness,” ORNL researcher Hugh O’Neill, of the lab’s Center for Structural Molecular Biology, said.

The discovery is not new – ORNL researchers had previously determined the light conversion properties of platinized photosystem I complexes and based their present achievements on this data. “We’re building on the photosynthesis research to explore the development of self-assembly in biohybrid systems. The neutron studies give us direct evidence that this is occurring,” O’Neill said.

Eventually, hydrogen will get transformed into electricity through fuel cells and used to power electric motors. This is yet another points where energy is lost through inefficiency, but I tend to think it’s better to directly generate the gas than generate electricity through solar cells, then turn it into hydrogen and then into electricity again. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?