May 12, 2015

Hydrogen from water and sunlight




Hydrogen has great potential as a fuel so that progress in their preparation are key in the field of alternative energies. Researchers from the Photovoltaic and Optoelectronic Devices Universitat Jaume I have developed an organic device that reduces water to hydrogen using only sunlight. Organic materials offer greater versatility and efficiency at a lower cost than inorganic heretofore used in these devices, but present stability problems in contact with an aqueous medium. The study published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry and framed in the European project PHOCS achieves exceptional stability in these devices and represents an important step in obtaining solar fuels from organic materials. Sixto Gimenez, coordinator of the research, noted that through the device developed at the UJI "has achieved the production of hydrogen for three hours, demonstrating stability of organic materials that had not been reached so far."


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