Recent advances and demonstrated potentials for clean hydrogen via overall solar water splitting
- PDF / 1,736,038 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 432 x 648 pts Page_size
- 97 Downloads / 219 Views
MRS Advances © 2019 Materials Research Society DOI: 10.1557/adv.2019.444
Recent advances and demonstrated potentials for clean hydrogen via overall solar water splitting Faqrul A. Chowdhury1,2 1
Department of Physics, McGill University, 3600 University Street, Montreal, Québec H3A 2T8, Canada
2
Department of ECE, McGill University, 3480 University Street, Montreal, Québec H3A 0E9, Canada
ABSTRACT Solar water splitting can potentially play a significant role in the future, sustainable and carbon-neutral energy infrastructure - by generating hydrogen as a green fuel from renewable sources and liquid-fuels via carbon-dioxide reduction. Hydrogen has higher gravimetric energy-yield compared to most of the conventional fossil fuels, is storable and transportable on demand. With the prospective green hydrogen economy in mind, considerable efforts have been made in the quest for a stable and efficient photocatalyst/photoelectrode which can eventually lead towards the realization of large-scale hydrogen production system. This snapshot review provides a summary of the basic principles and challenges associated with unassisted overall water splitting, and highlights the recent technological advancements made on the device and system designs on lab-scale - to improve different performance metrics, i.e., efficiency, stability, scalability and large-scale prototypes with demonstrated potentials for future developments.
INTRODUCTION Hydrogen (H2) is considered as a promising energy carrier for the future carbon-neutral energy infrastructure [1], where it can be used for diverse applications, including seasonal energy storage, on-demand electricity generation for stationary applications, as a direct fuel for hydrogen-powered electric cars, long-haul heavy transport and public transport (buses, trains etc.), for heating, and as a feedstock for the industrial processes such as manufacturing of glass, steel and fertiliser etc. However, hydrogen production nowadays is not free from carbon-dioxide (CO2) emission, since it mostly depends either on the high-temperature steam reforming via reaction with fossil fuels (e.g., natural gas, such as methane for ‘blue H2’) or coal gasification in the presence
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Macquarie University, on 07 Dec 2019 at 14:05:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1557/adv.2019.444
of oxygen (‘brown H2’). As such, only 4% of the world's hydrogen is produced from the electrical energy by promisingly electrolyzing water, compared to more than 90% driven by thermal energy. However, in the pursuit of carbon-free clean energy, there had been a significantly increased interest in hydrogen generation from renewable energy sources, namely, the most abundant solar and water resources on Earth, via artificial photosynthesis [1-3]. Numerous approaches had been pursued so far to construct an artificial photosynthetic system for the generation of ‘clean/green H2’. Photocatalytic or photochemical
Data Loading...