Iridium replaced with ruthenium in hydrogen production

The successful addition of nickel to ruthenium dioxide (RuO2), by the lab of chemical and biomolecular engineer Haotian Wang at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering, is claimed to have resulted in a robust anode catalyst that produced hydrogen from water electrolysis for thousands of hours under ambient conditions.

“There’s huge industry interest in clean hydrogen,” Wang said in a statement. “It’s an important energy carrier and also important for chemical fabrication, but its current production contributes a significant portion of carbon emissions in the chemical manufacturing sector globally. We want to produce it in a more sustainable way, and water-splitting using clean electricity is widely recognised as the most promising option.”

Iridium costs roughly eight times more than ruthenium, he said, and it could account for 20 to 40 per cent of the expense in commercial device manufacturing, especially in future large-scale deployments.

The process developed by Wang, Rice postdoctoral associate Zhen-Yu Wu and graduate student Feng-Yang Chen, and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Virginia is detailed in Nature Materials.