VATIS UPDATE Article

In the United States, a Florida State University (FSU) researcher played a major role in a new discovery in how to produce pure hydrogen, a green energy fuel, by splitting water. Jose Mendoza-Cortes, partnering with a research team at Penn State University (PSU), the United States, has investigated new ways to create clean energy, particularly hydrogen fuel. In particular, researchers found that by tinkering with a transition metal alloy, they could effectively and efficiently split water molecules and produce pure hydrogen.

Mauricio Terrones, at PSU, had been interested in exploring how the compound molybdenum disulfide could be used to split water. However, he and his team realized that the compound’s protons did not overlap well with that of hydrogen. The scientists had also been experimenting with adding tungsten and graphene to the molybdenum disulfide, so Mendoza-Cortes began running simulations on how much of these elements could be added and how it would affect the ultimate chemical reaction.

Mendoza-Cortes and Terrones ultimately determined that the best way to split the hydrogen was to create an alloy with the molybdenum disulfide. They created a thin film with alternating graphene and tungsten-molybdenum layers. That created a much more efficient process and lowered the electrical voltage required to split the water from 200 millivolts with pure molybdenum disulfide to 96 millivolts with the tungsten-molybdenum alloy.