hydrogen tagged posts

Devices made of readily available oxide and carbon-based materials can produce clean hydrogen from water over weeks — according to new research.

The findings, co-led by Dr Virgil Andrei, a Research Fellow at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, with academics at Imperial College London, could help overcome one of the key issues in solar fuel production, where current earth-abundant light-absorbing materials are limited through either their performance or stability.

Underexplored materials for light harvesting

Hydrogen fuel will play a critical role in the transition to full decarbonisation and reaching the UK’s goal of net-zero emissions by 2050...

As the world’s energy demands increase, so does our consumption of fossil fuels. The result is a massive rise in greenhouse gases emissions with severely adverse environmental effects. To address this, scientists have been searching for alternative, renewable sources of energy.

A main candidate is hydrogen produced from organic waste, or biomass, of plants and animals. Biomass also absorbs, removes and stores CO2 from the atmosphere, while biomass decomposition can lead to negative emissions or greenhouse gas removal. But even though biomass heralds a way forward, there is still the question of the best way to maximize its conversion into energy.

Biomass gasification

There are currently two main methods for converting biomass into energy: gasification and pyrolysis...

Data offer new clues about why stars explode. A team of astronomers at The Ohio State University showed that the satellite survey TESS, could be used to monitor a particular type of supernova, giving scientists more clues about what causes white dwarf stars to explode – and about the elements those explosions leave behind.

“We have known for years that these stars explode, but we have terrible ideas of why they explode,” said Patrick Vallely, lead author of the study and an Ohio State astronomy graduate student...

Researchers have created a smart device capable of producing large amounts of clean hydrogen. By concentrating sunlight, their device uses a smaller amount of the rare, costly materials that are required to produce hydrogen, yet it still maintains a high solar-to-fuel efficiency. Their research has been taken to the next scale with a pilot facility installed on the EPFL campus.

Scientists at EPFL’s Laboratory of Renewable Energy Science and Engineering (LRESE) came up with the idea of concentrating solar irradiation to produce a larger amount of hydrogen over a given area at a lower cost...