New lung-like device converts water into clean fuel

In a groundbreaking innovation, researchers have created new type of ‘lungs’ that can convert water into clean hydrogen fuel used in cars.

Inspired from actual human lungs, researchers from Stanford University have created a new lung-like device that turns water to hydrogen fuel, a clean source of energy.

Human lungs move air through a thin membrane, which then extracts oxygen and sends it into the blood stream. The device uses similar principle to power reactions used for making the hydrogen fuel.

The team made a 12-nanometer thick plastic film with small pores on one side that repel water. The other side of the film was coated with gold and platinum nanoparticles that were involved in the chemical reactions. The film was then rolled, with its edges sealed in order to make a tiny pouch with the metal layer on the inside, explained New Scientist.

As soon as water was applied with a voltage for splitting into hydrogen and oxygen, the gases entered the lung-like device and created energy as they passed through the conductive metals on the inside of the pouch.

The team discovered that their device was 32% more effective at concerting energy rather than using the same membrane laid in a flat position. As per the researchers, this is because the lung-like shape does a better job than other fuel cell designs of minimizing the bubble that can form and hurt efficiency during the energy-generation process, reported Futurism.

Also, the material was found to be stable over longer time periods. The team ran the reaction through the device for 250 hours, and it retained 97% of its catalytic energy, as compared to a traditional carbon-based membrane decayed up to 74% of its activity in only 75 hours.

For now, the team will focus on scaling-up the device’s design and finding a way to get it to tolerate higher temperatures, since at present, it doesn’t work above 100°C, which could ‘limit its applications’, as per Jun Li, first author of the study published in the journal Joule.