MENU

Porous silicon generates hydrogen from sunlight

Porous silicon generates hydrogen from sunlight

Technology News |
By eeNews Europe



The material also has application potential for who also see applications for batteries, biosensors and optical electronics.

"This porous silicon can generate a good amount of hydrogen just from sunlight," explained Donghai Wang, assistant professor of mechanical engineering.
"The surface area of this porous silicon is high.  It is widely used and has a lot of applications."

The standard method for manufacturing porous silicon is a subtraction method, similar to making a sculpture.

"Silicon is an important material because it is a semiconductor.  Typically, porous silicon is produced by etching, a process in which lots of material is lost," said Wang.

Wang’s team used a chemically based method that builds up the material rather than removing it. The researchers start with silicon tetrachloride which is an inexpensive source of silicon and treat the material with a sodium potassium alloy.

"The bonds between silicon and chlorine in silicon tetrachloride are very strong and require a highly reducing agent," said Wang. "Sodium potassium alloy is such an agent."

Once the bonds break, the chlorine binds with the sodium, potassium and silicon, potassium chloride and sodium chloride to become solid, forming a material composed of crystals of salt embedded in silicon. The material is then heat-treated and washed in water to dissolve the salt, leaving pores that range from 5 to 15 nm. The researchers report their results in the Apr. 10 issue of Nature Communications.

Because sodium potassium alloy is highly reactive, the entire procedure must be done away from the oxygen in the air, so the researchers carry out their reaction in an argon atmosphere.

"I believe that the process can be scaled up to manufacturing size," said Wang. "There are some processes that use sodium potassium alloy at industrial levels. So we can adapt their approaches to make this new type of porositic silicon."

Because these silicon particles have lots of pores, they have a large surface area and act as an effective catalyst when sunlight shines on this porous silicon and water. The energy in sunlight can excite an electron that then reduces water, generating hydrogen gas. This process is aided by the material’s larger-than-normal band gap, which comes from the nanoscale size of the silicon crystallites.

Related articles and links:

www.psu.edu

News articles:

Panasonic cracks solar cell 25 percent conversion efficiency barrier

Material breakthrough speeds production of cheaper solar cells

Solar cell efficiency – Is it all in the mix?

If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :    eeNews on Google News

Share:

Linked Articles
10s