Cheaper Hydrogen and Fuel Cells

Dean Sigler Fuel Cells, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Hydrogen would be a wonderful fuel if it were easy to get and easy to use.  It makes up 90 percent of all atoms in the universe, equal to about 75 percent of all the mass.  Hydrogen has been expensive to obtain because quite often its extraction from other matter entails using expensive catalysts such as platinum. Russia and America Team Up to Get Cheap Hydrogen Scientists from the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, working with researchers at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and in Jinan, China combined efforts to produce hydrogen using sunlight and photosensitive lipids.  We associate lipids with getting blood drawn at the clinic, and waiting patiently to see how our cholesterol and triglycerides are doing.  Lipids are water insoluble fats, and are a key to this inexpensive method of extracting hydrogen. Using titanium dioxide as a photocatalyst, the teams “inserted a photosensitive protein into nanodiscs — made from circular fragments of cell membrane …