Research Projects

In the forthcoming era of hydrogen economy, production of hydrogen in a cost-effective and ‘green’ route is most anticipated. Direct seawater electrolysis is one of the simplest techniques of hydrogen production from currently available water electrolysis technologies available for nature’s abundant seawater. In order to facilitate its commercialization, a long-term performance stability of the electrolyser must be addressed and implemented. The complex composition of seawater often causes performance decline of the electrolyser due to unwanted chemical reaction at cathode and anode surfaces as well as physical damage to the cell. There are several challenges, such (i) unwanted chlorine oxidation, (ii) cation led surface blockage at cathode, (iii) H₂ evolution-competing reactions, (iv) catalyst poisoning, and (v) corrosion need to be taken up to overcome this performance instability of the electrolyser. We have developed various earth abundant electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) which are capable of splitting water of wide pH ranges (0.1-14) at low overpotential ( less than 200 mV) to achieve high current density (about 50-100 mA/cm²). However, one of the major challenges is to deal with make them suitable for seawater electrolysis where unwanted HER & OER are to be avoided and stabilizing the catalyst loaded electrode from corrosion. Here we propose to adopt some countermeasures for the electrocatysts and the electrode. We propose to develop OER & HER electrocatalysts combination of electrodeposition and rapid thermal diffusion techniques developed in our lab. Various transition metal dissolution on the surface of porous Ni forming bi-& multi-metallic surface alloy is to be tested for reduction of OER overpotential and enhance the sluggish water oxidation kinetics by the transition metal d-orbital engineering. Highly metallic phase rich (1T) transition metal chalcogenides developed in our lab are to be employed in cathode which have better Cl- ion resistance than Pt. We propose also to develop corrosion protective CeO₂ to prevent electrode corrosion. A surface modification of the catalyst will be done by making it hydrophilic and aerophobic for efficient bubble escapes. All developed cathode and anode will be tested with 160W electrolyser stack run by a 300Wp PV module.