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Dr Derek Hao (left) and Associate Professor Ravichandar Babarao with a model of the low-cost material and the precursor material used in the study. Image Credit: Will Wright, RMIT University

RMIT researchers and international collaborators have demonstrated a new way to significantly increase green hydrogen production using low-cost materials, offering a potential pathway to cheaper clean fuel.

Green hydrogen is expected to play a major role in cutting emissions from industries such as shipping, steelmaking and aviation. But producing it efficiently remains a major hurdle.

By improving a widely used compound, titanium dioxide, the team reported hydrogen production more than 80 times higher than the commercial untreated version under the same test conditions.

Lead researcher Dr Derek Hao, from RMIT’s School of Science, said the research added to a growing effort to make hydrogen production both more efficient and more affordable.

“By showing how a common material can be improved to produce more hydrogen, the study points to a practical direction for future work,” he said.

“If similar gains can be achieved under real-world conditions, it could help bring down the cost of clean hydrogen production at scale.”

RMIT collaborated with Zhoukou Normal University and Xinyang University from China on the research.

Many of the most effective hydrogen-producing systems rely on expensive metals such as platinum.

“This work shows that comparable performance can be achieved using low-cost, widely available materials, which is critical if hydrogen production is to scale up,” Hao said.

One promising approach to hydrogen production uses light to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. In practice, much of that energy is lost before it can do useful work.

This research focuses on reducing that waste, helping more of the energy go into producing hydrogen rather than being lost along the way.

Rather than developing an entirely new system, the team upgraded titanium dioxide, a material already used widely in coatings, pigments and energy technologies.

They made a series of small but targeted changes, including adding small amounts of nickel, introducing defects that help guide how energy moves and shaping the material into tiny hollow spheres to better capture light.

Together, these changes allow the system to hold onto energy longer and direct it to where hydrogen is formed.

In lab testing, the improved system produced significantly more hydrogen than standard versions, particularly when exposed to ultraviolet light.

It also maintained performance over repeated testing, suggesting the approach is stable over time.

The experiments were carried out under controlled laboratory conditions using a methanol-containing solution, meaning the system demonstrates hydrogen production in a simplified setting rather than full water splitting.

Performance was strongest under ultraviolet light, though the researchers observed some activity under visible light.

Further work is needed to test how the approach performs under full sunlight and without added chemicals.

Associate Professor Ravichandar Babarao, Dr Li Gao and Associate Professor Yichao Wang from RMIT were co-authors.

‘Nanoconfined Ni single-atom Ni–O–Ti atomic asymmetric sites for highly efficient and stable photocatalytic hydrogen evolution’ is published in a top journal, Applied Catalysis B: Environment and Energy.

Source: RMIT University