Researchers develop technique to help advance hydrogen fuel creation

Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Notre Dame University recently developed an integrated theory-experiment technique that could help advance the process of creating hydrogen fuel from water and sunlight.

The technique can be used to interrogate chemistry at interfaces between solids and liquids. The researchers used the techniques to study oxides formed on gallium phosphide (GaP) and indium phosphide (InP) surfaces under conditions relevant to PEC hydrogen production.

The researchers then simulated possible chemical species that could occur on photoabsorber surfaces in contact with aqueous media, which they then characterized by spectroscopic fingerprints using quantum-mechanical calculations.

Researchers from Notre Dame then experimentally validated the calculations using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy.

The authors explored how chemistry at the solid/liquid interface affects the semiconductor stability during operation. They discovered that, when compared to GaP, the hydrogen network near InP surfaces is more fluid, enabling self-healing of surface imperfections that improve the corrosion resistance of the InP.

“The rapid developments in computational and experimental methods now make it possible to directly integrate the two in a manner that we haven’t seen before,” lead author Tuan Anh said. “This provides a new way to understand the chemistry of very complex interfaces that otherwise couldn’t be tackled by any single technique. Our work is a roadmap for probing these types of interfaces in a wide variety of energy technologies.”

The research was published in the Jan. 4 edition of the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.