Sunlight + Water = Hydrogen Fuel

Following the recent dip in their reputation over the climate change research incident, there seems to be some good news for scientists at University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, that just might be compelling enough to salvage some of their lost credibility.

Thomas Nann and colleagues from the university have developed a new technique that can convert 60% of absorbed sunlight energy into the inflammable Hydrogen gas fuel!

How?

An electrode is used for this purpose. It is a gold electrode with a special coating and it is dipped into water and then exposed to light.
There are clusters of Indium phosphide that measure 5 nanometers in width on the surface of the electrode and they absorb incoming photons in light and pass electrons bearing that energy onto clusters of another compound, Sulphurous iron.
This material will then combine those electrons with protons from water to form the gaseous hydrogen.
A plain platinum electrode is also present to complete the circuit electrochemically.

Oh well… the same feat has been achieved before! Why should I care about this anymore than the rest?

Well here’s why…

Previously organic molecules were used for this purpose. Sunlight quickly bleached these molecules and as a result they became inefficient in a few weeks!

This time however, scientists at University of East Anglia have used inorganic materials. Hence this system is far more resilient. And it’s not just that. This system can achieve 60% conversion efficiency and after two weeks of exposure to sunlight it still showed no drop in its performance!

Reason for the high efficiency?

The Indium phosphide clusters can absorb photons in light better than organic materials.

Anything else?

The scientists involved in the project are in the process of refining the system. They claim that there was no specific reason for using gold or platinum and it was only because those materials were quite common in the laboratory.

Now if only we could say the same about our households…

-A comment would be nice -