Nanoparticles use sunlight to make hydrogen fuel from steel industry byproduct
Even indoors, the polished aluminum lining of the 42-inch bowl is squint-inducing.
Cardboard held in the path of this solar collector catches fire in seconds. A temperature monitor that maxes out at 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit is quickly abandoned for one that can track the heat to the 2,500 degrees it soon reaches. In minutes, the solar collector team members are all wearing wrap-around welding glasses, like engineering Men in Black.
But there’s more to these solar pyrotechnics than blinds the eye. Abdul-Majeed Azad, a chemical engineer and associate professor at the
Every year, steel manufacturers create many tons of iron oxide. Mr. Azad, 49, has found a way to use the material to unleash hydrogen from water via the same chemical process that produces rust, all under the power of the sun.
Steam passing over hot iron interacts with the iron surface. The iron grabs the oxygen in the steam, releasing the hydrogen. The problem is, the amount of hydrogen produced that way wouldn’t pay for the process of making it.
But what if you could increase the surface area of the iron? For Mr. Azad, the solution was to think small: like a billionth of a meter small - nanoscale. If the iron oxide could be converted into nanoscale particles, the surface area available for a chemical reaction would increase many thousands of times.
It’s the difference between the surface area of a sugar cube and the surface area of thousands of sugar grains. But in Mr. Azad’s world view, sugar grains are enormous boulders.
A human hair is 80,000 nanometers wide, according to the National Nanotechnology Initiative. Mr. Azad and his team managed to scale the iron particles down to 5 to 20 nanometers. At that scale, about 3.5 ounces of iron - think your average chocolate chip cookie - has the surface area of a football field.
Even without the solar-hydrogen production, nanoscale iron has other uses, Mr. Azad said. Arsenic sticks to iron nanoparticles, which means the particles can filter arsenic from water. His nanoparticles are being tested at a water purification project in