Studies, research findings, and interesting tidbits from the ever-expanding scientific world.
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Hydrogen production isn't the hardest part though, we know ways to do that even if it's hard to scale. The hardest part has always been transportation and storage. Hydrogen is famous for leaking straight through metal tank walls and causing explosions. That's not something I would want to put on my house.
Sounds interesting - and still a long ways off. It will be interesting to see if they can properly industrialize their design, solve durability issues and increase the efficiency to come closer to that of photovoltaics, which are currently at around 4-5 times the efficiency.
Right now, the system exhibits an efficiency of 5.8 percent, which is high for the materials used, the team writes. They are now working on developing better photocatalysts and optimizing the reactor to boost efficiency.
File under lab... Maybe someday.
Sounds like a cool design! For anyone else who might have been having a hard time visualizing what one of these channels looks like, I found a cross-section in the paper that I'll try to remember to edit into this comment once image uploads are working again.
Also:
They are now working on developing better photocatalysts
Yup, isn't everyone! Better photocatalysts for splitting water is a huge area of materials science research right now! Turns out to be – like most catalysis research – really quite difficult to do. Fingers crossed for some breakthroughs in the coming years though.