New nanomaterial developed to harness solar energy

There’s a huge demand for fossil fuels and a lot of research is on-going to discover new sources of clean-burning fuel.  Providing a boost to these efforts, researchers have developed a new hybrid material to help harvest solar energy.   

However, the electricity to power this exercise makes the process expensive. Yang Yang from the University of Central Florida's NanoScience Technology Center and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering has spent ten years working on solar hydrogen and exploring new ways of harvesting solar energy. He used gas from seawater to produce hydrogen to power fuel cells.

His team developed a new hybrid nanomaterial that harnesses solar energy more efficiently and inexpensively. "We've opened a new window to splitting real water, not just purified water in a lab," Yang said. "This really works well in seawater." The research team developed a new catalyst that stands up to the harsh conditions found in seawater. According to Yang, producing a chemical fuel from solar energy is a better solution than producing electricity from solar panels. A photocatalyst, which is a material that spurs a chemical reaction using energy from light, was used in the process.

Yang is confident that this breakthrough could lead to a new source of clean-burning fuel and ease the demand for fossil fuels. The team will continue their work with the catalyst and focus on improving its performance and explore ways of scaling up fabrication.

Source:
Limin Guo, Zhenzhong Yang, Kyle Marcus, Zhao Li, Bingcheng Luo, Le Zhou, Xiaohui Wang, Yingge Du, and Yang Yang
MoS2/TiO2 Heterostructures as Nonmetal Plasmonic Photocatalysts for Highly Efficient Hydrogen Evolution
Energy & Environmental Science, DOI: 10.1039/C7EE02464A
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