New electrode materials for hydrogen production

In the future it will be important to focus more on renewable energy sources and thus there is a need of finding a new energy carrier, which is able to average the time variations of the energy production from renewable sources like solar cells and wind power. Here hydrogen is at the moment considered a possible solution. Thus it would be favorable to be able to produce and convert hydrogen easily. In that respect electrolysis of water into hydrogen can be done eficiently using platinum electrodes, but platinum is both a scarce and expensive metal. Thus there is a high demand for development of new efficient and cheap electrode matenals. The project is based on the recent work, where it was found that Mos_2 nanoparticles could be a usable electrode material on the cathode when hydrogen was produced despite that fact that bulk Mos_2 materials are semiconductors. However, when present in the form of nanoparticles they display conductive edges making them useful as electrode materials. Preliminary investigations showed that Mos_2 which is an inexpensive material in fact can produce hydrogen with an overpotential of only 0,15 volts with respect to a platinum electrode. The aim of the project is to optimize and explore the potential of metal sulfides as hydrogen evolution electrodes by identifying, synthesizing, characterizing, and testing metal sulfide catalysts