Engineers Create Clean Hydrogen: The Future of Powering Cars

Hydrogen may be the future of clean energy. Engineers at Duke University have developed a novel method for creating clean hydrogen, which could prove essential to weaning society off of fossil fuels.

Hydrogen is used in fuel cells that produce electricity through chemical reactions. In addition, many industrial processes require hydrogen as a chemical reagent and vehicles are beginning to use hydrogen as a primary fuel source. Unfortunately, hydrogen is difficult to produce and collect. It's often expensive, and current methods produce carbon monoxide, which is toxic to both humans and animals.

Now, though, researchers may have found a method that's both inexpensive and less toxic. They've discovered a way to reduce carbon monoxide levels to nearly zero in the presence of hydrogen and the harmless bydroducts of carbon dioxide and water. They also demonstrated that they can produce hydrogen by reforming fuel at much lower temperatures than conventional methods, which makes it a more practical option.

So exactly how do they do this? The engineers used a new catalytic approach. Catalysts are agents added to promote chemical reactions. In this case, the catalysts were nanoparticle combinations of gold and iron oxide (rust). While current methods rely only on gold nanoparticles to drive the process, the researchers used both catalysts as the focus.

"It had been assumed that the iron oxide nanoparticles were only 'scaffolds' holding the gold nanoparticles together, and that the gold was responsible for the chmical reactions," said Titlayo "Titi" Shodiya, a graduate student working in the laboratory of senior researcher Nico Hotz, who was involved with the study. "However, we found that increasing the surface area of the iron oxide dramatically increased the catalytic activity of the gold."

The researchers ran the reaction for more than 200 hours in order to verify their findings. They discovered that there was no reduction in the ability of the catalyst to reduce the amount of carbon monoxide in the hydrogen gas.

"The mechanism for this is not exactly understood yet," Shodiya said. "However, while current thinking is that the size of the gold particles is key, we believe the emphasis of further research should focus on iron oxide's role in the process."

The findings are published in the Journal of Catalysis.