Catalyst could boost hydrogen prodcution

The study, published online at the Journal of the American Chemical Society, introduces a new catalyst structure that can facilitate the use of electricity to produce hydrogen gas from water.

The material, molybdenum disulfide, contains two common elements, noted Mark Lukowski, a Ph.D. student working with associate professor Song Jin in the UW-Madison chemistry department. ‘Most people have tried to reduce the cost of the catalyst by making small particles that use less platinum, but here we got rid of the platinum altogether and still got reasonably high performance.’

The research group has so far produced milligram quantities of the catalyst. ‘In principle you could scale this up,’ Lukowski said in a statement. ‘Molybdenum disulfide is a commercially available product. To control purity and structure, we go through the trouble of synthesising it from the bottom up, but you could buy it today.’

To make the new material, Lukowski and Jin deposit nanostructures of molybdenum disulfide on a disk of graphite and then apply a lithium treatment to create a different structure with different properties.