Catalysts are materials used to enable and accelerate a chemical reaction. There is a long history of using them in industry to manufacture different hydrocarbons, ammonia, sulfuric acid, and the list goes on. By choosing your materials well and tinkering with the structure at the molecular level, the catalyst can greatly improve the efficiency of the conversion process. Glennda Chui at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory describes how their research on manufacturing hydrogen from water has doubled the efficiency of the catalyst lanthanum nickel oxide (LNO), which has a perovskite structure. Only the composition of the surface atomic layer needs to be changed. More importantly, the structure undergoes a transformation during the chemical reaction. Understanding and controlling this transformation will give industry the equivalent of a knob they can turn to fine-tune the catalystâs behaviour. As Chui explains, LNO is not the most efficient catalyst for hydrogen manufacture. But the lessons learned will point to ways the efficiency of other catalysts can be greatly improved.
Scientists, crafting a nickel-based catalyst used in making hydrogen fuel, built it one atomic layer at a time to gain full control over its chemical properties. But the finished material didnât behave as they expected: as one version of the catalyst went about its work, the top-most layer of atoms rearranged to form a new pattern, as if the square tiles that cover a floor had suddenly changed to hexagons.
But thatâs ok, they reported today, because understanding and controlling this surprising transformation gives them a new way to turn catalytic activity on and off and make good catalysts even better.
The research team, led by scientists from Stanford University and the Department of Energyâs SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, described their study in Nature Materials.
âCatalysts can change very quickly during the course of a reaction, and understanding how they transform from an inactive phase to an active one is crucial to designing more efficient catalysts,â said Will Chueh, an investigator with the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC who led the study. âThis transformation gives us the equivalent of a knob we can turn to fine-tune their behaviour.â
Splitting water to make Hydrogen fuel
Catalysts help molecules react without being consumed in the reaction, so they can be used over and over. Theyâre the backbone of many green-energy devices.
This particular catalyst, lanthanum nickel oxide or LNO, is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen in a reaction powered by electricity. Itâs the first step in generating hydrogen fuel, which has enormous potential for storing renewable energy from sunlight and other sources in a liquid form thatâs energy-rich and easy to transport. In fact, several manufacturers have already produced electric cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
But this first step is also the most difficult one, said Michal Bajdich, a theorist at the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis at SLAC, and researchers have been searching for inexpensive materials that will carry it out more efficiently.
Since reactions take place on a catalystâs surface, researchers have been trying to precisely engineer those surfaces so they promote only one specific chemical reaction with high efficiency.
Building materials one atomic layer at a time
The LNO investigated in this study belongs to a class of promising catalytic materials known as perovskites, named after a natural mineral with a similar atomic structure.
Christoph Baeumer, who came to SLAC as a Marie Curie Fellow from Aachen University in Germany to carry out the study, prepared LNO in whatâs known as an epitaxial thin film â a film grown in atomically thin layers in a way that creates an extraordinarily precise arrangement of atoms.
Dividing his time between California and Germany, Baeumer made two versions of the film at different temperatures â one with a nickel-rich surface and another with a lanthanum-rich surface. Then the research team ran all the versions through the water-splitting reaction to compare how well they performed.
âWe were surprised to discover that the films with nickel-rich surfaces carried out the reaction twice as fast,â Baeumer said.
Tuning a catalystâs surface for better performance
To find out why, the team took the films to DOEâs Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where a group led by SlavomiĚr NemsĚaĚk looked at their atomic structure with X-rays at the Advanced Light Source.
âIt was surprising that the difference between the âgoodâ and the âbadâ catalyst was only in the last atomic layer of the films,â NemsĚaĚk said. Those investigations also revealed that in films with nickel-rich surface layers that were prepared at cooler temperatures, the top layer of atoms transformed at some point during the water-splitting reaction, and this new arrangement boosted the catalytic activity.
Meanwhile, Jiang Li, a postdoctoral researcher and theorist at SUNCAT, performed computational studies of this very complex system using Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). His conclusions agreed with the experimental results, predicting that the version of the catalyst with the transformed surface â from a cubic pattern to a hexagonal one â would be the most active and stable one.
Bajdich said, âIs the transformation of the nickel-rich surface driven by the way the catalyst is prepared, or by changes it undergoes while it carries out the water-splitting reaction? Thatâs very hard to answer. It looks like both have to occur.â
Although this particular catalyst is not the best in the world for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, he said, discovering how a surface transformation boosts its activity is important and could potentially apply to other materials too.
âIf we can unlock the secrets of this transformation so we can accurately tune it,â he said, âthen we can leverage this phenomenon to make much better catalysts in the future.â
The Advanced Light Source and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center are DOE Office of Science user facilities. Scientists from Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany also contributed to this research. The project was funded by the DOE Office of Science, and Baeumer was also supported by the European Unionâs Horizon 2020 research and innovation program through a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship.
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Glennda Chui is a Senior Editor, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University and the U.S. Department of Energy
This article is published with permission
Joseph Cho says
Thanks for your comment
I am not an expert in this field, but I am interested in mass production. Looking at recent papers, it seems that the focus is only on improving efficiency. However, I think it is important to know that the surface where the catalytic action actually takes place changes over time. No matter how high efficiency is, if long-term operation is impossible, I think it is meaningless in terms of commercialization.
I have a question.
Anyway, I think that the thin film process is the most advantageous method like perovskite. In this case, would a company with an existing semiconductor process be advantageous?