Alternatives to clean fuel based on nanoparticles

In the future, it will be possible to develop cheap clean energy technologies thanks to a new discovery - a team of researchers from Penn State University discovered that it is possible to initiate, or accelerate, an important chemical reaction to create hydrogen from water using nanoparticles composed of nickel and phosphorus, two cheap elements that are very common on Earth .

In the future, it will be possible to develop cheap clean energy technologies thanks to a new discovery - a team of researchers from Penn State University discovered that it is possible to initiate, or accelerate, an important chemical reaction to create hydrogen from water using nanoparticles composed of nickel and phosphorus, two cheap elements that are very common on Earth .

The findings of the new study were published in the scientific journal Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The lead researcher explains that the purpose of the nanoparticle composed of nickel and phosphide is to help create hydrogen gas from the splitting of a water molecule - an important process for many technologies to create energy, including fuel cells and solar cells. "Water is the perfect fuel, since it is cheap and common, but we need to extract the hydrogen stored in it," explains the lead researcher. Hydrogen has a high energy content and is an efficient energy carrier, but energy must be invested in order to produce it. In order to make its production a practical process, scientists are trying to find a way to initiate the required chemical reactions with inexpensive catalysts. The researcher explains that this goal was achieved to a good extent by the use of platinum metal, but in light of the fact that this metal is expensive and quite rare, the researchers tried to find cheaper alternative materials.

"There have been several predictions that nickel phosphide might be a worthy candidate, and my lab team has been working with nickel phosphide nanoparticles for many years," said the principal investigator. "It turns out that these nanoparticles were indeed active in the creation of hydrogen and their efficiency is comparable to the best alternatives available today based on platinum."

In order to prepare the nickel phosphide nanoparticles, one of the members of the research team began to examine commercially available metal salts. In the next step, the researchers dissolved these salts, added additional chemicals and heated the solution to create the nanoparticles. The researchers succeeded in making a nanoparticle with a quasi-spherical shape - not perfectly spherical but spherical with many flat and exposed edges. "The small size of the nanoparticle created a high surface area, and the exposed edges mean that there is a high number of sites available to catalyze the chemical reaction that produces the hydrogen," adds and explains the lead researcher.

The researchers' next step was to examine the activity of these nanoparticles as catalysts for various chemical reactions. They did this by inserting the nanoparticles into a sheet of titanium foil and immersing this sheet in a solution of sulfuric acid. In the next step, the researchers applied an electric voltage and measured the resulting current. The measurements revealed that the chemical reactions were indeed accelerated and very efficiently.

"The nanoparticle technology has already paved the way for obtaining cheaper and cleaner energy that is both efficient and useful," explains the lead researcher. "Our goal now is to further improve the performance of these nanoparticles and understand why they work in this way. In addition, our research team believes that our success with nickel phosphide will pave the way for the discovery of new catalysts that will also be based on other common metals. Insights The acceptance of this discovery may lead to even better and more effective catalysts in the future."

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