Left unchecked, corrosion can rust out vehicles and pipes, take down buildings and bridges, and eat away at our monuments.
Corrosion can even injury units that might be key to a clear vitality future. And now, Duke College researchers have captured excessive close-ups of that course of in motion.
“By finding out how and why renewable vitality units break down over time, we would have the ability to lengthen their lifetime,” stated chemistry professor and senior creator Ivan Moreno-Hernandez.
In his lab at Duke sits a miniature model of 1 such system. Referred to as an electrolyzer, it separates hydrogen out of water, utilizing electrical energy to energy the response.
When the electrical energy to energy electrolysis comes from renewable sources comparable to wind or photo voltaic, the hydrogen gasoline it churns out is taken into account a promising supply of unpolluted gas, as a result of it takes no fossil fuels to provide and it burns with out creating any planet-warming carbon dioxide.
A variety of nations have plans to scale up their manufacturing of so-called “inexperienced hydrogen” to assist curb their dependence on fossil fuels, notably in industries like steel- and cement-making.
However earlier than hydrogen can go mainstream, some large obstacles should be overcome.
A part of the difficulty is electrolyzers require uncommon steel catalysts to operate, and these are susceptible to corrosion. They are not the identical after a 12 months of operation than they had been at first.
In a research printed April 10 within the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Moreno-Hernandez and his Ph.D. pupil Avery Vigil used a method known as liquid part transmission electron microscopy to check the advanced chemical reactions that go on between these catalysts and their setting that trigger them to decay.
You may bear in mind from highschool that to make hydrogen gasoline, an electrolyzer splits water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen molecules. For the present research, the crew centered on a catalyst known as ruthenium dioxide that hastens the oxygen half of the response, since that is the bottleneck within the course of.
“We basically put these supplies by a stress take a look at,” Vigil stated.
They zapped nanocrystals of ruthenium dioxide with high-energy radiation, after which watched the adjustments wrought by the acidic setting contained in the cell.
To take photos of such tiny objects, they used a transmission electron microscope, which shoots a beam of electrons by nanocrystals suspended inside a super-thin pocket of liquid to create time-lapse photographs of the chemistry happening at 10 frames per second.
The end result: desktop-worthy close-ups of virus-sized crystals, greater than a thousand instances finer than a human hair, as they get oxidized and dissolve into the acidic liquid round them.
“We’re really in a position to see the method of this catalyst breaking down with nanoscale decision,” Moreno-Hernandez stated.
Over the course of 5 minutes, the crystals broke down quick sufficient to “render an actual system ineffective in a matter of hours,” Vigil stated.
Zooming in lots of of 1000’s of instances, the movies reveal refined defects within the crystals’ 3D shapes that create areas of pressure, inflicting some to interrupt down sooner than others.
By minimizing such imperfections, the researchers say it may in the future be potential to design renewable vitality units that final two to 3 instances longer than they presently do.
“So as a substitute of being secure for, say, two years, an electrolyzer may final six years. That might have a large affect on renewable applied sciences,” Moreno-Hernandez stated.
This analysis was supported by grants from the Nationwide Science Basis (DGE-2139754, ECCS-2025064, ECCS-2025064).
