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A new type of catalyst that uses five times less platinum than usual could help make hydrogen production cheaper in the future.
Splitting water molecules with electricity generates hydrogen (electrolysis) has “great potential as a plentiful and green energy source,” said a Canadian Light Source (CLS) press release.
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But the materials used to accelerate the chemical reaction are costly: platinum currently costs about $85 per gram.
“The process is dependent on platinum, which is scarce and expensive,” said Victor Mashindi, an electrochemist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, in a statement. “We wanted to find an alternative catalyst that doesn’t use as much platinum.”
Mashindi was part of an international team that developed the new catalyst. The team, which included members from South Africa, Brazil, Canada and Germany, had its work recently published in ACS Applied Energy Materials.
In previous research, platinum was shown to be more effective than metals like nickel and cobalt, which provide some catalytic activity in electrolysis.
“So the team created a catalyst that replaces some of the platinum with nickel and cobalt and mounted it on tiny structures made of carbon (nanospheres), to hold the metals in place and maximize the surface area for the chemical reaction,” said the research organization.
Typically, a catalyst contains around 20 per cent platinum by weight, whereas the new version uses around five times less platinum — just four per cent by weight — which saves money.
“The catalyst uses the same total amount of material, just with less platinum, to produce the same amount of hydrogen,” said Mashindi, and performs just as well as more platinum-rich catalysts.
Using the Canadian Light Source at the University of Saskatchewan, the team studied how the various components of the new catalyst are arranged and how they interact.
“The data we obtained from the CLS helped us form a clearer understanding of the atomic structure of the catalyst,” said Dean Barrett, a materials scientist at the University of the Witwatersrand, who led the work.
“This information enabled us to fine-tune the material properties at the nanoscale towards the desired outcome of producing more hydrogen and using less platinum. We can only get that type of data by using a facility like the CLS.”
While the new catalyst shows promise, the work is still at an early stage, said Barrett in the statement.
A local start-up company in South Africa was founded by the team. The team and this company may work together to further develop the idea.
“We work at the level of fundamental science,” he said. “We need to make sure what works in the lab can be scaled up,” he said.
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