New catalyst could cut cost of making hydrogen fuel [View all]

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http://www.news.wisc.edu/21929

[font face=Serif][font size=5]New catalyst could cut cost of making hydrogen fuel[/font]

July 2, 2013 | by David Tenenbaum

[font size=3]A discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison may represent a significant advance in the quest to create a "hydrogen economy" that would use this abundant element to store and transfer energy.

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To make the new material, Lukowski and Jin deposit nanostructures of molybdenum disulfide on a disk of graphite and then apply a lithium treatment to create a different structure with different properties.

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"Like graphite, which is made up of a stack of sheets that easily separate, molybdenum disulfide is made up of individual sheets that can come apart, and previous studies have shown that the catalytically active sites are located along the edges of the sheets," says Lukowski.

"The lithium treatment both causes the semiconducting-to-metallic phase change and separates the sheets, creating more edges. We have taken away the limitation from molybdenum disulfide and made the active sites both more pervasive and more reactive."

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja404523s