Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) stumbled upon a discovery that could forever revolutionize how we acquire hydrogen from water, according to a press release from the institution published on Thursday.
Light as a trigger The team was led by Associate Professor Xue Jun Min, Dr Wang Xiaopeng and Dr Vincent Lee Wee Siang from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering under the NUS College of Design and Engineering (NUS CDE). The discovery they made was that light could trigger a new mechanism in a catalytic material used in water electrolysis. “We discovered that the redox center for electro-catalytic reaction is switched between metal and oxygen, triggered by light,” said Jun Min. “This largely improves the water electrolysis efficiency.” It all began with an accidental power trip of the ceiling lights in Jun Min’s laboratory almost three years ago. Back then, the ceiling lights in Jun Min’s research lab were normally turned on for 24 hours. When the lights went off due to a power failure, there was an opportunity to observe something that scientists had never witnessed before. When the researchers returned the next day, they found that the darkness had influenced the performance of a nickel oxyhydroxide-based material in the water electrolysis experiment. It had fallen drastically. “This drop in performance, nobody has ever noticed it before, because no one has ever done the experiment in the dark,” said Jun Min. “Also, the literature says that such a material shouldn’t be sensitive to light; light should not have any effect on its properties.” Jun Min and his team knew they had stumbled on something significant, and they embarked on numerous repeated experiments to test out their new theories. They eventually had enough data to publish a paper. Now, the team is working on new ways to improve industrial processes to generate hydrogen such as making the cells containing water to be transparent, so as to introduce light into the water splitting process.
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