Scientists are experimenting with a solar powered artificial leaf to make Hydrogen out of water using inexpensive materials and low-cost engineering & manufacturing processes.
The process mimics nature's ability to carry out photosynthesis, which is only 1% efficient. The efficiency of artificial leaf technologies could exceed 20%.
A major current challenge in catalyst research involves designing materials that speed up specific reactions and make only the products we want.
“It basically looks like this sandwich structure—the catalyst layers are sandwiching the photo-absorber,” says Peter Agbo, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab who works with the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis.
One of the challenges is finding a catalyst that is inexpensive, kind to the environment and only produces what is needed. Engineers from the University of California at Berkeley, for example, recently combined nanoparticles with living nonphotosynthetic bacteria.
Existing devices are also small. A hydrogen device with 12.6% efficiency that Agbo recently built was less than one inch across. For artificial photo-synthesis to become practical, it needs to produce fuels at a large scale to compete with the world’s existing energy supply of relatively inexpensive and abundant fossil fuels.
Scaling up artificial photosynthesis is still far off, but it’s moving along.
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