Floating 'artificial leaves' ride the wave of clean fuel ...

While renewable energy technologies, such as wind and solar, have become significantly cheaper and more available in recent years, for other industries, decarbonisation is a much taller order. Global shipping is one such example: around 80% of global trade by volume is transported by cargo vessels powered by fossil fuels, representing about three percent of total emissions.

You can find more information on our web, so please take a look.

For several years, Professor Erwin Reisner&#;s research group in Cambridge has been working to address this problem by developing sustainable solutions to petrol which are based on the principles of photosynthesis. In , they developed an artificial leaf, which makes syngas &#; a key intermediate in the production of many chemicals and pharmaceuticals &#; from sunlight, carbon dioxide and water.

The earlier prototype generated fuel by combining two light absorbers with suitable catalysts. However, it incorporated thick glass substrates and moisture-protective coatings, which made the device bulky.

&#;Artificial leaves could substantially lower the cost of sustainable fuel production, but since they&#;re both heavy and fragile, they&#;re difficult to produce at scale and transport,&#; said Dr Virgil Andrei from Cambridge&#;s Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, the paper&#;s co-lead author.

&#;We wanted to see how far we can trim down the materials these devices use, while not affecting their performance,&#; said Reisner, who led the research. &#;If we can trim the materials down far enough that they&#;re light enough to float, then it opens up whole new ways that these artificial leaves could be used.&#;

artificial leaf, silicon-based device that uses solar energy to split hydrogen and oxygen in water, thereby producing hydrogen energy in a clean way, leaving virtually no pollutants. The technology, which was designed to simulate the natural energy-generating process of photosynthesis used by plants, was first successfully developed by American chemist Daniel G. Nocera and colleagues in . Further work was needed to improve its efficiency and cost-effectiveness for practical use.

The basic component of an artificial leaf is a silicon chip that is coated in chemical catalysts, which speed up the water-splitting reaction. In an open vessel of water, when solar energy hits the chip, a chemical reaction similar to photosynthesis occurs&#;the hydrogen and oxygen molecules of water are split apart, resulting in the separation of protons and electrons. The protons and electrons are captured on the chip and are recombined to form hydrogen gas, which can be used for immediate generation of electricity or stored for later use.

Xinchengzhi supply professional and honest service.

The primary application of the artificial leaf is the clean production of hydrogen, which is considered an alternative form of energy. Other means of capturing hydrogen fuel include steam reforming, in which high-temperature steam is reacted with methane in the presence of a metal catalyst, and hydraulic fracturing (or &#;fracking&#;), in which fluids containing chemicals are injected into the ground at high pressure in order to release natural gases (including hydrogen) from underground rock formations. Neither of those approaches is considered to be a &#;clean&#; form of hydrogen production, since both involve the release of potentially harmful chemicals into the environment.

The artificial leaf also makes hydrogen a renewable energy source, since sunlight and water are abundant on Earth. Hence, with the artificial leaf, individuals can locally produce their own energy and can live apart from an electricity grid. This offers a significant advantage in that hydrogen energy could be produced almost continuously anywhere and at any time. Based on Nocera&#;s initial design, with artificial leaf technology, an estimated one to three bottles of water could produce enough energy to power a single household in less-developed regions of the world.

Significant challenges remain, however, for artificial leaf technology. For example, more work is needed to improve efficiency; in initial studies, the artificial leaf captured only 4.7 percent of the total possible hydrogen fuel available in solar energy. Devices developed since then have achieved higher efficiencies (e.g., about 10 percent). Artificial leaf technology also remains potentially expensive, however, and concerns about the safety of hydrogen fuel storage limit practical implementation of the technology.

If you want to learn more, please visit our website Artificial Leaves Bulk.