Given two catalysts for the job of turning intermittent wind or solar energy into chemical fuels, scientists chose the material that gets the job done quickly and uses the least energy.
A new catalyst is faster when it and its surrounding acid have the same proton donating ability or pKa, according to scientists at the Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis, an Energy Frontier Research Center, at PNNL.
Proton delivery and removal determines if a well-studied catalyst takes its highly productive form or twists into a less useful structure, according to scientists at PNNL.
A fast and efficient iron-based catalyst that splits hydrogen gas to make electricity — necessary to make fuel cells more economical — was reported by researchers at the Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis, based at PNNL.
By grafting features analogous to those in Mother Nature's catalysts onto a synthetic catalyst, scientists at PNNL created a hydrogen production catalyst that is 40% faster than the unmodified catalyst.
Moving four relatively large protons to where they are needed is easier if you build a path, as is being done by scientists at the Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis.
When it comes to driving hydrogen production, a new catalyst built at PNNL can do what was previously shown to happen only in nature: store energy in hydrogen and release that energy on demand.
Twisting and pinching slow a catalyst's ability to generate energy from hydrogen, according to scientists at PNNL's Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis.
Looking to nature for their muse, researchers at PNNL have used a common protein to guide the design of a material that can make energy-storing hydrogen gas.
Scientists at PNNL's Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis and Villanova University designed a nickel-based complex that more than doubled previously reported hydrogen gas production rates and increased the energy efficiency of the reaction
To design catalysts for fuel cells and other devices, design their ligands to facilitate the movement of protons, according to Dr. Daniel DuBois and Dr. Morris Bullock at PNNL.
In an invited review article in the MRS Bulletin, scientists from the Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis discuss the role and need to control proton movement in potential solar devices.
PNNL researchers have benchmarked a number of commonly used density functional theory (DFT) and electron-correlated molecular orbital theories in their ability to describe the free energy profile for H2 oxidation/evolution
New results reported in Chemical Communications describe the synthesis, structure, and catalytic reactivity of a nickel complex that is the fastest molecular electrocatalyst for oxidation of hydrogen.
