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."