A new technique for clean hydrogen by scientists from Toronto and Fujitsu
A new technique for searching through chemical space has been discovered by scientists from the Toronto University in cooperation with Fujitsu hoping to find materials with desirable properties.
It seems that in their research they have found a promising new catalyst that could be helpful to reduce the costs of clean hydrogen production. This important discovery hails the coming of more sustainable methods of storing energy, from all types of renewable resources.
Ted Sargent is a professor in the Edward S Rogers Sr. department of electrical and computer engineering, and has written a paper published in matter. he said:
“Scaling up the production of what we call green hydrogen is a priority for researchers around the world because it offers a carbon free way to store electricity from any source.
“This work provides proof-of-concept for a new approach t overcoming one of the key remaining challenges, which is the lack of highly active catalyst materials to speed up the critical reactions.”
Green hydrogen beyond grey and blue hydrogen
Currently, the vast majority fo hydrogen production is derived from natural gas. Obviously as a by-product of this process is carbon dioxide, it’s not that good forth environment.
Grey hydrogen is where the CO2 is released into the earth’s atmosphere, and blue hydrogen is where the CO2 gas is captured in some form of storage for use elsewhere.
However the production of green hydrogen implies that it has no impact upon the earth’s ecosystem in a negative way as it doesn’t use any form of carbon based fuels in its production.
The process typically uses an electrolyser to split water into two elements, oxygen and hydrogen. This stored hydrogen fuel can be used at a later date in order to generate power/ electricity.
Quantum computing to simulate potential catalyst materials
The issue is with this process is that generally most electrolysers are quite inefficient as much of the energy is wasted as heat, and not captured in the hydrogen.
Pioneering researchers around the world are attempting to find better catalysts, and more efficient ways to produce such green hydrogen, but the actual number of permutations that they must run before they find a suitable solution is becoming an uphill battle.
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-quantum-inspired-catalyst-hydrogen.html
Jehad Abed, who has a PhD in materials science and engineering said: : “One way to do it is by human intuition, by researching what materials other groups have made and trying something similar, but that’s pretty slow.”
“Another way is to use a computer model to simulate the chemical properties of all the potential materials we might try, starting from first principles. But in this case, the calculations get really complex needed to run the model becomes enormous.
So the team turned to a quantum inspired computing to look for solution. A Digital Annealer was used to find a solution to the problem. This was developed jointly by University of Toronto, and Fujitsu Research.
Fujitsu now also has the Fujitsu Co-creation Research Laboratory at Toronto University as a result of the joining forces. Matsumura, senior researcher at Fujitsu Consulting Inc. in Canada said of the technology:
“The Digital Annealer is a hybrid of unique hardware and software designed to be highly efficient at solving combinatorial optimisation problems. These problems include finding the lost efficient route between multiple locations across a transportation network, or selecting a set of stocks to make up a balance portfolio.
“Searching through different combinations of desired properties is another example, and it was a perfect challenge for our Digital Annealer to address.”
In the previously mentioned paper a cluster expansion technique was used to analyse an enormous number of catalyst material designs somewhere close they estimated to be close to hundreds of quadrillions.
One quadrillions probably equates to the number of seconds that would pass by in 32 million years. Eventually suitability was found amongst a promising family of materials made up of manganese, antimony, oxygen, chromium and ruthenium.
No other research groups had discovered this kind of data. Following the findings some synthesis was conducted and the team found the amount of reactions that could be catalysed per mass was almost eight times higher than the best catalysts currently available.
It also operates well within an acidic environment, which is a necessary requirement for electrolysis equipment. Usually iridium is a typical are element used to manufacture electrolysers, but high in cost. But ruthenium is fat more common and much cheaper.
Though much work still remains to be done before the process is optimised for stability and output, the new research is a great testament to the effectiveness of using such quantum inspired computing to search chemical space.
Hitarth Choubisa, electrical and computer engineering PhD candidate who is the other co lead author of the paper said: “I think what’s exciting about this project is that is shows how you can solve really complex and important problems by combining expertise from differently fields,”
“For a long time, materials scientists have been looking for these more efficient catalysts, and computational scientists have been designing more efficient algorithms, but the two efforts have been disconnected.
“When we brought them together, we were able to find a promising solution very quickly. I think there are a lot more useful discoveries to be made this way.”
Source: university of Toronto
