Scientists continue research on how to produce hydrogen fuel from water, a « carbon law » to achieve zero emissions is proposed, and NASA wants to use lasers to connect Mars to Earth’s internet.
This week in science is a review of the most interesting scientific news of the week.
Scientists have created a huge “artificial sun” to generate hydrogen from water
Hydrogen is considered by scientists as the best alternative fuel to current fossil fuels because it doesn’t produce carbon emissions when burned to generate power, which means it doesn’t add to global warming. Unfortunately, hydrogen is rare on Earth, in contrast to the rest of the universe, and therefore it is necessary to obtain it from sources such as water.
Inspired by concentrated solar power plants, which use mirrors to focus sunlight onto a small area to increase the temperature of a small area where steam from melted salt is produced to generate power, scientists from the German Aerospace Center have created the Synlight. Built in Jülich, Germany, Synlight uses 140 Xenon short-arc lamps focused on a 20 by 20-centimeter spot to generate light 10,000 times more intense than the Sun’s radiation that reaches anywhere on Earth, achieving temperatures above 3,000°C.
This enormous structure has cost $3.8 million to be built and consumes in four hours the same amount of electricity as a four-person household would in a year. But if the scientists succeed in their attempt to trigger a high-energy reaction to extract hydrogen from water vapor, Synlight could then be used as a prototype for future large-scale and constant sources of liquid hydrogen fuel.
Finally, this is not the only possibility for obtaining hydrogen from water being currently researched. As already covered here at Neowin , photoelectrochemical cells (PECs) are responsible for absorbing sunlight and driving water-splitting reactions, from which hydrogen is generated, and could as well be used as future sources of hydrogen fuel.
