Scientists at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) created a new AI method. This method speeds up Green Hydrogen Production. It does this by quickly finding materials with the right qualities. This breakthrough could greatly lower the cost of producing green hydrogen on a large scale. Green hydrogen is a hopeful energy source for the future.
The Challenge of Water Electrolysis
To reach carbon neutrality, we should make green hydrogen in large amounts with water electrolyzers. But these electrolyzers need scarce and valuable platinum group metals. These metals speed up the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). This reaction is necessary for making hydrogen. Because of this, producing a lot of green hydrogen is costly and hard.
Researchers are looking for new electrocatalysts. These are made from cheaper, more common elements. Finding the best mix from countless options is hard. It takes a lot of time and work.
The AI Solution
The NIMS research team created an AI technique. This technique predicts the materials’ compositions with desired features. It changes prediction models based on the dataset size. With this technique, they found new OER electrocatalytic materials in one month. They selected from 3,000 candidates. Doing this manually would have taken almost six years.
The results demonstrated that this AI technique could be used to expand the limits of human intelligence and dramatically accelerate the search for higher-performing materials.
New, Effective Materials
Researchers discovered that the newly electrocatalytic materials consist of relatively cheap and abundant elements such as manganese, iron, nickel, zinc, and silver. They found that these materials exhibit superior electrochemical properties compared to the existing electrocatalysts with the highest OER activity known. What’s even more promising is that scientists can synthesize these new materials in large quantities due to their abundance in Earth’s crust. This makes them ideal for mass production of green hydrogen using water electrolyzers.
The Future of Green Hydrogen Production
This AI technique has opened up new possibilities for accelerating the search for high-performance materials. It has also shown that collaboration between humans and machines can lead to groundbreaking discoveries in a fraction of the time it would take with manual evaluation.
To learn more about this exciting development in green hydrogen production, check out the full research published in ACS Central Science. Let’s continue to explore innovative solutions like this to achieve a sustainable future.
