HyperSolar has announced that the company has achieved a significant technological milestone in its pursuit of clean hydrogen fuel production, by eliminating an expensive hydrogen-oxygen separation process.
This will dramatically reduce the overall system cost of hydrogen fuel production from sunlight.
Self-contained sunlight driven water-splitting technology, also commonly referred to as “artificial photosynthesis,” typically produces hydrogen and oxygen gas bubbles in the same reactor. This hydrogen-oxygen gas mixture is potentially explosive and must be quickly separated from each other. Current gas separation technology uses selective membranes and is very expensive and the membranes need to frequently be replaced.
HyperSolar has developed a novel reactor design and system architecture that uses a high voltage solar cell, that can be wrapped in the company’s patent pending polymer coating, that serves two functions: (1) convert sunlight into electricity to split water into hydrogen on one side, and oxygen on the other side, and (2) acts as a physical barrier preventing oxygen from combining with hydrogen. The respective hydrogen and oxygen gas bubbles to the top of the reactor as two separate and pure gas streams. This novel design circumvents the need for membrane separators all together.
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