Energy Water
Marquette scientists are aiming to create hydrogen power from water.
Dr. Jier Huang, assistant professor of chemistry, has launched a five-year project to understand the interactions of sunlight, water and some complex organic-metal structures. Complicated and obscure? Yes, but Huang takes the long view: “The final goal is trying to solve the global energy problem and climate change,” she says.
Her project employs solar power in generating hydrogen and aims to test whether this method can beat previous technologies in efficiency and cost. It’s shown enough promise that Huang received a $555,636 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation — the NSF’s most prestigious award for non-tenured faculty — to support it. Five Marquette scientists have been awarded CAREER grants in the past five years, three received by chemistry faculty alone.
Huang’s work is part of a much larger quest for cheap, clean fuel. If it succeeds, it would be an early step in a much longer journey to the long-promised “hydrogen economy.” As far back as 1970, scientists and engineers have suggested hydrogen, the power at the core of the sun and the stars, as an emissions-free alternative to dirty petrochemical fuels. Hydrogen is everywhere, but it’s locked inside water, a combination of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom in every molecule. The stumbling block has been extracting it.
Passing electricity through water can split H2O molecules, releasing hydrogen, “but that has not been very sustainable,” Huang says. Solar power — light energy — offers an alternative but requires a catalyst to speed up the process. And the usual materials used to gather sunlight are expensive and unstable — “easy to make and easy to break,” says Huang.
Huang and her research team are now testing the use of stable, less-expensive, light-absorbing semiconductor materials in combination with an efficiency-promoting catalyst. One possible catalyst is a crystalline framework that links cobalt-based metal nodes with organic molecules. That creates a porous structure and potentially a double benefit: Materials for absorbing sunlight can be embedded within the empty spaces, and water can pass through the structure. If immersed and energized, the material holds promise that it could effectively separate water molecules to produce hydrogen.
Even if this method succeeds, she observes, her project is just the rst step in a series that includes developing practical applications and nding safe methods of storing volatile and explosive hydrogen gas. Huang is confident that these problems will get the necessary attention in time “if we can really build a device that is efficient, cheap and stable.”
And with that, she gets back to work.
— Erik Gunn
