Researchers at Caltech and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have nearly doubled the number of materials known to have potential for use in solar fuels. They did so by developing a process that promises to speed the discovery of commercially viable solar fuels that could replace coal, oil, and other fossil fuels.
Solar fuels, a dream of clean-energy research, are created using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide (CO2). Researchers are exploring a range of target fuels, from hydrogen gas to liquid hydrocarbons, and producing any of these fuels involves splitting water. Each water molecule is comprised of an oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen atoms are extracted, and then can be reunited to create highly flammable hydrogen gas or combined with CO2 to create hydrocarbon fuels, creating a plentiful and renewable energy source. The problem, however, is that water molecules do not simply break down when sunlight shines on them — if they did, the oceans would not cover most of the planet. They need a little help from a solar-powered catalyst.
To create practical solar fuels, scientists have been trying to develop low-cost and efficient materials, known as photoanodes, that are capable of splitting water using visible light as an energy source. Over the past four decades, researchers identified only 16 of these photoanode materials. Now, using a new high-throughput method of identifying new materials, a team of researchers led by Caltech’s John Gregoire and Berkeley Lab’s Jeffrey Neaton and Qimin Yan have found 12 promising new photoanodes.
Read more here (California Institute of Technology. “New materials could turn water into the fuel of the future: A new materials discovery approach puts solar fuels on the fast track to commercial viability.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 6 March 2017.)
Original paper: Yan, Q., Yu, J., Suram, S.K., Zhou, L., Shinde, A., Newhouse, P.F., Chen, W., Li, G., Persson, K.A., Gregoire, J.M. and Neaton, J.B., 2017. Solar fuels photoanode materials discovery by integrating high-throughput theory and experiment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(12), pp.3040-3043.
