Hydrogen Production Breakthrough: How SLAC and Stanford's Research is Changing the Game

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So Its been a while since I have last made a video on a new Hydrogen breakthrough, and I know you guys love these videos, but I don’t want to make a video on every little thing that happens in the field, but when something really cool happens, im on it. And today is one of those days. Today we will take a look at some of the work done by researchers from SLAC, and Standford University, in colloberation with the University of Oregon and Manchester Metropolitan University. In other words a whole bunch of smart people.
But what did they do? Well these researchers have made a breakthrough in the production of Hydrogen. You see They have successfully developed a seawater-resilient bipolar membrane electrolyzer, And the goal with this system is to generate hydrogen gas from sea water without producing large amounts of harmful byproducts.
The team's study, published in the journal Joule, details the promising alternative of generating hydrogen and oxygen from untreated water sources, particularly seawater, which has the potential to advance efforts in the production of low-carbon fuels. The team's breakthrough is significant, as ultrapure water has been a requirement in contemporary proton exchange membrane-based electrolysis, making the process energy-intensive and costly. Which was one of the biggest problems with hydrogen. The cost.
The team started by controlling the most harmful element in seawater, chloride, which can interfere with the water-to-hydrogen reaction. Chloride, which makes seawater salty, can reduce the lifetime of an electrolysis system and can become unsafe due to the toxic nature of the oxidation products that include molecular chlorine and bleach. To mitigate this, the team developed a bipolar membrane in their experiment, which allows access to the conditions needed to make hydrogen gas and prevents chloride from getting to the reaction center.
You see when building the perfect electrolyzer, The ideal membrane system would perform three primary functions: separating hydrogen and oxygen gases from seawater, moving only useful hydrogen and hydroxide ions while restricting other seawater ions, and preventing undesired reactions. Combining all three together is the goal here.
In the team's experiment, positive hydrogen ions passed through one of the membrane layers to a place where they could be collected and turned into hydrogen gas by interacting with a negatively charged electrode. The second membrane in the system allowed only negative ions, such as chloride, to travel through. As an additional backstop, one membrane layer contained negatively charged groups that were fixed to the membrane, which made it harder for other negatively charged ions, such as chloride, to move to places where they shouldn't be.
The negatively charged membrane proved to be highly efficient in blocking almost all of the chloride ions in the team's experiments, and their system operated without generating toxic byproducts such as bleach and chlorine.
Now this Study did more than just give us a way to produce hydrogen from sea water, the study also provided a better general understanding of how seawater ions moved through membranes, which could help scientists design stronger membranes for other applications