The use of solar energy and wind power to produce hydrogen through electrolysis water is an important technical means of storing renewable energy. There are two types of catalysts used to accelerate the reaction of electrolysis water, one of which is highly catalytic but requires the use of precious metal iridium materials, which is expensive, while the other is lower but catalytic efficiency is not high.
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The Swiss Paul Rosier Institute (PSI) has recently successfully developed a highly efficient nano-catalyst that can be used to obtain hydrogen from electrolytic water, without the use of precious metals and therefore inexpensive. The new catalyst is a perovskite compound composed of barium, strontium, cobalt and iron. The research team first developed a new process, in the “flame injection” equipment to control the appropriate conditions, so that barium, strontium, cobalt, iron atoms in the flame to form a small nano-particles with the required structure, so that the catalyst with the largest surface area, to form more to accelerate the water molecule cracking “activation center.” By adjusting the proportion of oxygen elements in the material, a series of catalyst materials can be formed. This new kind of catalyst successfully completed the trial operation in the test device of the energy system integration platform of the state-level new energy research infrastructure in Switzerland, its performance can be comparable with that of the traditional iridium oxide material, but the cost is low and the production process is easy to realize large scale production.
The Institute is working with the U.S. electrolysis water equipment manufacturing enterprise to further validate and test its performance and reliability in the actual application of industrial equipment.
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