MaSF - Materials and Materials Processing Technologies for Solar Fuels

In the transition to a fully sustainable energy infrastructure, much work has been done in producing sustainable energy from sustainable sources such as solar and wind energy. These sources, however, are intermittent and their power output varies on the timescale of hours, days, weeks and seasons as well as regional variations are important.

While sun and wind can in principle produce enough total energy for our society, adopting them on a large scale poses a new challenge: safe, clean and efficient storage of the electricity produced in an easily transportable form. While storage in batteries is possible, it is less efficient than chemical fuels. These fuels offer a much higher gravimetric and volumetric energy storage capacity than electrical storage. In its new Solar Fuels division, DIFFER aims to develop techniques to store clean electricity from sun and wind in the form of chemical fuels. Such solar fuels have energy densities up to ten times higher than electrical storage techniques, and match the existing worldwide liquid fuel infrastructure (see figure).

In solar fuels research, DIFFER's division MaSF (Materials and Materials Processing Technologies for Solar Fuels) presently focuses on two technologies to store intermittent sustainable energy in chemical form. The new research is managed by the director of the FOM Institute DIFFER prof. dr. ir. M.C.M. (Richard) van de Sanden (phone: +31 30 60 96 914 - e-mail: m [dot] c [dot] m [dot] vandesanden [te] differ [dot] nl).

• For the production of artificial methane and higher-order hydrocarbon, DIFFER uses an plasma approach to tackle CO₂ dissociation. A high dissociation efficiency is made possible by preferentially exciting vibrational states in the CO₂ molecule, exploiting the nonequilibrium state of the plasma medium. This is the crucial first step in forming syngas, a mixture of H₂  and CO, which can then be further processed chemically using the conventional Fischer-Tropsch process.
  
  
  
   
• A discovery in the institute's Plasma Surface Interaction experiments, in which extreme non-equilibrium processing of materials is investigated, is the formation of highly porous 'nano fuzz' on the surface of metals (W, Fe, Mo, etc.) exposed to the high density, low energy plasma in Pilot-PSI and Magnum-PSI. MaSF is investigating the application of the oxidized porous and photo-active material structures in a so-called photo-electrochemical cell utilizing the photocatalytical dissociation of water into hydrogen and oxygen, opening directly the storage of solar energy in molecular hydrogen.
  
  

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