Issue 37/2015 - Metal oxides achieve efficient hydrogen production by water splitting

By regulating the surface structure of metal oxide materials at the atomic level, it can more efficiently catalyze water splitting to produce hydrogen, which is a major challenge in the field of clean energy, and it is also an important progress
made by Professor Yang Huagui's research group of the School of Materials Science and Technology of East China University of Science and Technology.

Metal oxides are a widely used and important class of compounds, but in an acidic environment, they have little activity
to catalyze water decomposition to produce hydrogen.
Yang Huagui's research group came up with the idea of improving the catalytic activity of materials by regulating their geometric electronic structure at the
atomic level.

Through literature review and experimental exploration, the research group carried out local atomic structure transformation of inert tungsten trioxide by gas phase reduction method, and successfully prepared dark blue tungsten oxide, thereby discovering a new class of high-efficiency catalysts for hydrogen production by water decomposition, and proposed a new concept of designing and preparing high-efficiency catalysts in a general sense: that is, starting from completely inactive metal oxides, high-efficiency hydrolysis hydrogen production catalysts were obtained through local atomic structure regulation
。
A number of authoritative review experts believe that this achievement will promote the development of artificial photosynthesis technology, solar water splitting technology, fuel cells and other related clean energy fields in the future
.
The research group has now planned to structure more metal oxides to promote similar activity
.

(Painting)