New Materials Could Turn Water into Fuel

Researchers at Caltech and Berkeley Lab have, in only two years, nearly doubled the number of materials known to have potential for use in solar fuels - putting solar fuels on the fast track to commercial viability. 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 are created using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. Researchers are exploring a range of target fuels, from hydrogen gas to liquid hydrocarbons, but producing any of these fuels involves splitting water. 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, the researchers from Caltech and Berkeley Lab have found 12 promising new photoanodes.

Transcript

00:00:04 in The Joint Center for artificial photosynthesis at Caltech we investigate millions of materials for converting sunlight into fuel this solar fuels prototype is splitting water to generate hydrogen fuel and jcap is building Technologies to create a broad range of renewable fuels for powering our society our Theory colleagues at the Lawrence

00:00:27 Berkeley lab can predict new materials faster than ever before and we test those predictions with high throughput material synthesis in this combinatorial sputter deposition system we combine multiple elements from the periodic table using a technique that's like Atomic spray painting this creates new materials in a thin film format that can be further optimized using thermal

00:00:50 processing which produces these colorful Library plates where each material looks different because it interacts with sunlight in a unique way to fully characterize the solar absorption properties we perform High throughput Optical spectroscopy which in addition to identifying promising light absorber materials provides critical data for combining with Theory to understand

00:01:12 these materials and design new ones after determining which materials can efficiently absorb sunlight we investigate their ability to convert that solar energy into chemical reactions that generate fuel this is photo electrochemistry and we invented an instrument that performs these experiments 100 to a thousand times faster than traditional methods the

00:01:36 photoelectrochemical reaction being measured here is water oxidation where the hydrogen atoms are extracted from water a crucial part of fuel generation the combination of our high thrit experiments and state-of-the-art computational methods is producing a vast materials database that enables us to generate scientific knowledge for a sustainable

00:01:59 future