Saturday, August 16, 2014

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Neofronteras "One step closer to artificial photosynthesis - Home -
A new catalyst brings us one step closer to the goal of producing hydrogen cheaply from sunlight without the mediation expensive photovoltaic cells. Light in the presence of a catalyst system southgate car centre divides the water. Source: Benjamin Yin.
For decades experimenting with catalysts that will generate hydrogen from water and sunlight. The system would be very simple: in the presence of sunlight water activated by a catalyst is split, producing bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen that could be used as fuel or to produce electricity. Unfortunately, although some work does not seem to be very efficient or economical. However, with the current problems of energy crisis and climate change, southgate car centre this type of technology has received new impetus southgate car centre and begin to appear new and promising results. One of the most recent results in this regard comes from a collaboration between Emory University and the Institute of Molecular Chemistry in Paris. They have developed a new catalyst of this type (or WOC its acronym in English) that allows the production of oxygen, which would be cheaper southgate car centre and faster than other previously developed. The achievement was published in Science on 11 March. Some systems southgate car centre that were developed in the past only allow the production of hydrogen, while oxygen was combined with the catalyst destroying the process, so that after some time the production of hydrogen stopped. Above, some of these catalysts were based on expensive elements such as platinum. For a catalyze viable WOC needs to be selective, stable and fast. Furthermore, homogeneity is also desirable because it increases the efficiency and makes the catalyst easier to study and optimize. The new catalyst has all these qualities and is based on an element like cobalt is not very rare in the Earth's crust. Could potentially help the development of solar energy. The idea of this type of catalysts is copy photosynthesis, which occurs naturally in plants, to produce fuels cleanly. The next step of this research group consist of the incorporation of such a catalyst in a water photolysis system solar-powered. A long-term goal is to produce oxygen and hydrogen from water and the combination in a fuel cell would produce electricity. Hydrogen could also be used as fuel in a heat engine or for the production of other fuels. In the end there would be balance emission of greenhouse gases, again yielding water as the final product. The main technical challenges to achieve power generation system such as the development of a sunlight collector, a catalyst southgate car centre to produce oxygen WOC type (as the recently achieved) and a catalyst to produce hydrogen. The three components need improvement, southgate car centre but the WOC type catalyst is the most difficult to achieve. The goal was to achieve these researchers WOC free organic catalyst structure due to the organic components are combined with oxygen and in the process destroy southgate car centre themselves. Enzymes are natural catalysts, but natural enzymes that are part of the photosynthetic system of plants are the least stable southgate car centre of Nature and some of the shorter-lived made because of all the hard function. Craig Hill, Emory University and participant in the project, said to have doubled this natural process by copying southgate car centre the essential features from photosynthesis and using them in a free synthetic carbon system. The WOC they have done is much more stable than the corresponding native enzyme. So far, 40 have developed catalysts WOC type, but they all had serious limitations, such as containing organic components that were oxidized during the process. southgate car centre Two years ago this same group of researchers developed a homogeneous, fast and free carbon catalyst but it was based on ruthenium, a rare and expensive element. Since then experiments southgate car centre have cobalt which is much more abundant (not as much as the researchers believe) and cheaper than ruthenium. This new catalyst has proven to be even faster than the one based on ruthenium.
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