New catalyst found for clean energy fuel

says Suib, Board of Trustees Distinguished

Professor of Chemistry and director of UConn's
Institute of Materials Science. "Our results show
that this material is more than competitive with the
state-of-the-art materials quoted in literature, and
exceptionally good for the reactions we need."
Current hydrogen production uses intense heat to
separate hydrogen from hydrocarbons found in
crude oil. But the resulting hydrogen isn't very pure,
and byproducts must be scrubbed out.
An alternate process, capturing hydrogen in water,
is cleaner and more sustainable, but it too has
Cover of the March 2016 Advanced Materials journal.
limitations. Electrocatalysts involved in this process
(A.M. El-Sawy et al., Oxygen Reactions: Controlling the are usually made of rare earth metals like platinum
Active Sites of Sulfur-Doped Carbon
and iridium. But they are very expensive, making
NanotubeGraphene Nanolobes for Highly Efficient
the commercialization of pure hydrogen fuels
Oxygen Evolution and Reduction Catalysis, Credit:
difficult.
Advanced Energy Materials, 2016, Vol. 6, no. 5. WileyVCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA. Reproduced with
permission

A team of UConn chemists led by professors

Steven Suib and James Rusling has developed a
new material that could make hydrogen capture
more commercially viable and provide a key
element for a new generation of cheaper, lightweight hydrogen fuel cells.

Finding a non-metal catalyst that has all of the

electrochemical properties of the rare earth metals
but can be made at a much reduced cost and still
remain stable has been a goal of scientists for
years.

Suib and Rusling, an expert in electrochemistry,

knew that sulfur-infused carbon graphene
nanotubes were a potentially efficient non-metal
catalyst for an oxygen reduction reaction. An
oxygen reduction reaction, or ORR, happens when
The new metal-free catalyst uses carbon graphene oxygen and hydrogen molecules are converted to
water. The reaction is a key component of
nanotubes infused with sulfur.
hydrogen-based fuel cells. Hydrogen gas used to
power the cells passes through a catalyst, currently
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the
universe and a promising source for clean energy. a corrosive-resistant metal like platinum, causing
an oxygen reduction electrochemical reaction that
But producing high-grade hydrogen is an
expensive and energy-consuming process. Often, creates energy and as a byproduct water.
the energy spent extracting hydrogen is worth
more than the hydrogen gas it produces. Finding a But reversing that process starting with water and
extracting pure hydrogen from it, a procedure
cheaper and more efficient way of capturing
hydrogen would go a long way toward the creation known as an oxygen evolution reaction is much
more of a challenge electrochemically. Suib and
of a sustainable hydrogen economy, and would
Rusling, working with a team of graduate students
help reduce the world's reliance on fossil fuels.
led by Ph.D. candidates Abdelhamid El-Sawy and
Islam Mosa, decided to give it a shot.
"We've made a material that looks pretty good,"

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The key, Suib says, was manipulating the sulfur

characterize the new material as it developed in the
and carbon atoms to create stable bonds and
lab, Suib says.
structures within the nanotubes, while also
maintaining or improving the tubes' electrochemical
potential so that it mirrored those found in the rare
metals.
"If you are going to make a hydrogen economy, you
need to have new materials that do the same thing
as the extremely expensive rare earth metals," says
Suib. "But how do you get something that is cheap,
durable, and stable enough to be scaled up to
industry levels? That was our challenge."
The process developed in Suib's and Rusling's labs
uses a dual doping procedure involving sulfur and
benzyl disulfide treated at high heat. The
researchers had to carefully add heteroatoms of
sulfur at extremely low levels to strike the delicate
balance needed to maintain usability and stability.
Add too much sulfur and the sample would be
unstable; not enough and it would be ineffective.
Suib says the procedure for isolating hydrogen in
water, in a very general way, is similar to trying to
separate flour and sand after they've been mixed
together thoroughly.
In the end, he says, the sulfur-doped nanotubes
used much less energy in the chemical reaction
process than other known processes, and were
much more active and efficient catalysts than other
known products.
Most importantly, he points out, the sulfur-infused
nanotubes are efficient for both separating
hydrogen from water and reducing oxygen into
water. Materials with those dual properties are rare,
he notes.
"I was surprised, in the end, that it worked so well,"
Suib says, with a grin. "We thought it might work,
but we didn't think it would work so well."
Powerful transmission electron microscopes and
scanning electron microscopes in UConn's
Bioscience Electron Microscopy Lab, Institute of
Materials Science, and new FEI Center for
Advanced Microscopy and Materials Analysis were
instrumental in helping researchers test and

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