05-Aug-2021 | Market Research Store
The research team at the University of Texas at Austin has recently uncovered a long-awaited question of producing clean hydrogen. The team concludes that the following process can be achieved by splitting one half of the water-spitting equation in order to produce hydrogen as a format of clean energy. The process requires by efficiently splitting oxygen molecules from water. The findings of the study are expected to present a deeper understanding and adoption of hydrogen as a key part of our energy infrastructure. However, previous efforts have mostly failed because the approached methods were deemed extremely costly.
The team hypothesized that they would need materials that are good at absorbing sunlight while not degrading the water-splitting reaction to take place. Furthermore, the material would be able to sustain instability under the pertaining conditions undertaken during the latter reaction while being able to be poor absorbers of sunlight. These conflicting requirements drove the team toward an inevitable standoff which is built by combining multiple materials such as silicon, for sunlight absorption and silicon dioxide that provides better stability into a single device. This made integration of a single component incredibly difficult.
Furthermore, the team had to face another challenge – electrons and holes created by absorption of sunlight in silicon must be able to move across freely in the layer pertaining to silicon dioxide. This would require the latter layer to be no more than a few nanometers thick, which reduced its effectiveness by protecting the silicon absorbed from degradation. The key to solving this issue comes from a method of creating electrically conducive parts through a thick silicon dioxide layer that can be produced at a low cost in terms of large scale manufacturing formats. To solve this conundrum, the team employed production means pertaining to manufacturing of electronic chips.