Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, January 7 (Xinhua) by imitating the key steps of natural photosynthesis, the University of Michigan recently developed a new type of solar panel, which achieves 9% efficiency in converting water into hydrogen and oxygen, which is nearly 10 times more efficient than similar solar hydrolytic hydrogen production equipment, representing a major technological leap.

The study, published in the journal Nature, includes two technological advances that make photocatalytic water separation more efficient. One is a smaller self-heating semiconductor that can withstand the equivalent of 160 suns.

Semiconductors are usually the most expensive part of equipment, and reducing the size of semiconductors also reduces the cost of the process. Peng Zhou, a researcher at the University of Michigan and lead author of the study, said in a statement: "We have reduced the size of semiconductors by more than 100 times compared to some semiconductors that only work at low light intensity. Hydrogen produced by our technology may be very cheap."

The second is that the new device can use the higher-energy part of the solar spectrum to decompose water, while using the lower-energy part of the spectrum to provide heat to promote the reaction. This "magic" is achieved by a semiconductor catalyst that, when using sunlight to drive a chemical reaction, repairs itself as it is used, reducing the degradation that the catalyst usually experiences.

CTOnews.com learned that the next challenge the team intends to address in the future is to further improve efficiency and achieve ultra-high purity hydrogen that can be fed directly into fuel cells.

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