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Nanosheets instead of platinum

28.05.2012

Platinum catalysts open up great prospects for alternative energy, for example, in the case of the production of hydrogen from water. However, the high price of platinum makes it difficult to implement the latest technologies on a large scale. Perhaps scientists from the Brookhaven National Laboratory of the US Department of Energy managed to solve this problem.

Scientists have developed a new type of inexpensive electrocatalyst that can efficiently extract hydrogen from water. The catalyst is based on a nickel-molybdenum-nitrogen compound in the form of crumpled sheets of nanometer scale.

Water is an ideal source of pure hydrogen: there is plenty of it on the planet and it does not contain harmful by-product greenhouse gases. The electrolysis of water into oxygen and hydrogen requires an external power source and an efficient catalyst. In this case, the hydrogen yield should be greater than the energy consumption for electrolysis.

In search of an effective catalyst, scientists heated a nickel-molybdenum compound to high temperatures in the presence of nitrogen and suddenly saw that the substance turned into nanosheets. Despite the fact that metal nitrides are widely used, this is the first example of the formation of nanosheets. Nitrogen expanded the lattices of the nickel-molybdenum compound and increased the electron density. Thus, a relatively inexpensive substance in its electronic structure approached noble metals. If these sheets are crumpled, then a catalyst with a large reactive surface area can be obtained.

The new catalyst works almost as well as platinum. In its electrocatalytic activity, it has no equal among other non-precious metal compounds. Moreover, the process of creating nanosheets is simple, scalable and suitable for a wide range of industrial applications.

Although the new catalyst is not the final and ideal solution to the problem of ultra-cheap hydrogen production, nevertheless, it can significantly reduce the cost of hydrogen fuel and equipment for its production.

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