Tyndall in collaboration with US and NI scientists to unlock energy potential in water

Researchers at Tyndall National Institute in Cork are partnering with scientists from the US and Northern Ireland on a €1m project aimed at unlocking the energy in water.

The project aims to use semiconductor materials and sunlight to isolate energy-laden hydrogen in water by replicating processes found in nature.

Entitled ‘Research into Emerging Nanostructured Electrodes for the Splitting of Water’ (RENEW), it is being led by Prof Martyn Pemble and Dr Paul Hurley at Tyndall, Prof Paul McIntyre at Stanford University and Prof Andrew Mills at Queen’s University Belfast.

Borrowing from electronics, the researchers will first seek to create the optimum ‘artificial leaf’ using layers of semiconducting materials such as silicon.

These would be water-resistant and used to ultimately create clean fuel by splitting the molecules of water into hydrogen and oxygen under natural conditions without any additional energy.

“The main focus for the project is a tiny, stacked arrangement of materials that is used for some transistors in the electronic industry,” Pemble explained.

“Previous work has shown that these structures can act as basic ‘artificial leaves’ for splitting water and the aim now is to make them more efficient.”

“We have been thinking about doing this for a long time – it is quite obvious that these layered structures can have other applications outside of electronics – and now we have got the opportunity to bring it forward.

“The ultimate goal is to combine our expertise to get to a point where you just drop the electrodes into water and when the sun comes out they would start to bubble away generating an unlimited, free and completely clean source of hydrogen, as well as oxygen.”

The Renew project is expected to run for the next three years and is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation in the US, Science Foundation Ireland and the Department for Employment and Learning for Northern Ireland under the US-Ireland Research and Development Partnership Program.