![]() ![]() While precious metal oxides have proven to be state-of-the-art catalysts that reduce energy consumption and enhance energy conversion efficiency, their scarcity, high cost and poor durability have limited their application at large scale. This is why we need catalysts such as metal oxides to speed things up." He said: "The oxygen evolution reaction is critical to the efficiency of devices that split water to produce hydrogen fuel, but it is also a sluggish chemical reaction that lowers the overall energy conversion efficiency. The water electrolysis process takes place in an electrolyser, where two main chemical reactions take place as water is split: one results in hydrogen production, while the other leads to oxygen production, and the two gasses are kept separate by a membrane.Īssoc Prof Xu, who is also part of NTU's Energy Research Institute, said the main bottleneck lies in the chemical reaction that leads to oxygen generation from the other side known as the oxygen revolution reaction. Hydrogen is also attractive as a viable alternative to traditional energy storage options such as lithium ion batteries, which gradually lose their charge over time. The findings were published in scientific journal Nature Catalysis in July.Ī step closer to a hydrogen-fuelled economyĮxtracting hydrogen from water electrolysis, when powered by renewable energy sources such as wind or solar energy, is an attractive approach to produce hydrogen fuel, which has the potential to replace fossil fuels used in power plants, transport, and the process of bunkering. ![]() Now, by identifying the parameters that make spinel oxides good catalysts for this process, we can create new, better spinel oxides based on these parameters, bringing us one step closer to a hydrogen-powered economy." This is in line with global trends-the European Union, for instance, recently unveiled its hydrogen strategy as an important part of the solution to meet the 2050 climate neutrality goal of the European Green Deal.Īssociate Professor Xu of the NTU School of Materials Sciences and Engineering said: "To improve the performance of spinel oxides, we need a deeper understanding of how they work as catalysts to make water electrolysis more efficient. These findings bring the team a step closer to making water splitting a suitable approach for large-scale manufacture of hydrogen gas, which has been highlighted by the Energy Market Authority as one possible low-carbon alternative for reducing Singapore's carbon footprint as it targets to halve its peak greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Primed with that new understanding, the team then used machine learning to select new spinel oxides with increased catalytic activity, making water electrolysis more efficient. They have unraveled, at the atomic scale, how spinel oxides work to speed up water electrolysis. Now, NTU Singapore's Associate Professor Jason Xu Zhichuan and his team have made two important advances. Spinel oxides, which are typically made of cheap transition metals, have garnered interest in recent years as a stable, low-cost catalyst that could overcome this challenge, but the design of high-performing spinel oxides has been hampered by the lack of understanding of how they work. Catalysts are therefore necessary to speed up these chemical reactions. A major challenge of this process lies in the energy loss as the chemical reactions involved in water electrolysis take place, driving up the cost to produce hydrogen through this method. ![]()
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