New iron catalyst could – finally! – make hydrogen fuel cells affordable

“We believe this is a significant breakthrough that will eventually help unleash the tremendous potential of hydrogen fuel cells”

11-Jul-2022 - For decades, scientists have been searching for a catalyst that dramatically reduces the cost of fabricating hydrogen fuel cells. Such an advancement could lead to a green power revolution, with everything from laptops to locomotives running on a fuel whose only byproduct is water. New research ...

Making ammonia 'greener'

Smaller ammonia processing plants powered by alternative energy

15-Jan-2019 - Ammonia, a compound first synthesized about a century ago, has dozens of modern uses and has become essential in making the fertilizer that now sustains most of our global food production. But while we've been producing ammonia at a large scale since the 1930s, it has been accomplished mainly in ...

Solving a 75-year-old mystery might provide a new source of farm fertilizer

29-Nov-2018 - The solution to a 75-year-old materials mystery might one day allow farmers in developing nations to produce their own fertilizer on demand, using sunlight and nitrogen from the air. Thanks to a specialized X-ray source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, researchers at the Georgia ...

Manganese may finally solve hydrogen fuel cells' catalyst problem

Widely available and inexpensive, the metal could lead to a renewable energy boom

01-Nov-2018 - Manganese is known for making stainless steel and aluminum soda cans. Now, researchers say the metal could advance one of the most promising sources of renewable energy: hydrogen fuel cells. In a study a University at Buffalo-led research team reports on catalysts made from the widely available ...

More effective catalyst with light

Plasmonic effect allows catalyst to work at lower energy

08-Oct-2018 - Rice University nanoscientists have demonstrated a new catalyst that can convert ammonia into hydrogen fuel at ambient pressure using only light energy, mainly due to a plasmonic effect that makes the catalyst more efficient. A study from Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) describes the ...

Electrochemically-produced ammonia could revolutionize food production

11-Jul-2018 - Steven McIntosh wants to transform the way ammonia is produced. He hopes to create a viable alternative to the conventional method, which uses massive amounts of energy and emits harmful carbon dioxide. He's exploring a sustainable electrochemical method to efficiently drive the chemical reaction ...

Intense conditions turn nitrogen metallic

11-Jul-2018 - New work from a team led by Carnegie's Alexander Goncharov confirms that nitrogen, the dominant gas in Earth's atmosphere, becomes a metallic fluid when subjected to the extreme pressure and temperature conditions found deep inside the Earth and other planets. Nitrogen is one of the most-common ...

TNT could be headed for retirement after 116 years on the job

18-Jun-2018 - Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland have developed a novel “melt-cast” explosive material that could be a suitable replacement for Trinitrotoluene, more commonly known as TNT. “The Army and the Laboratory, through the Joint ...

A green approach to making ammonia could help feed the world

18-May-2018 - A UCF research team with collaborators at Virginia Tech have developed a new "green" approach to making ammonia that may help make feeding the rising world population more sustainable. "This new approach can facilitate ammonia production using renewable energy, such as electricity generated from ...

Prediction of titanic nitride proved unsinkable

26-Jan-2018 - A team of experimental and computational scientists led by Carnegie's Tim Strobel and Venkata Bhadram have synthesized a long sought-after form of titanium nitride, Ti3N4, which has promising mechanical and optoelectronic properties. Standard titanium nitride (TiN), with a one-to-one ratio of ...