For decades, researchers around the world have searched for alternatives to iridium, an extremely rare, incredibly expensive metal used in the production of clean hydrogen fuels.
Now, a powerful new tool has found one -- within a single afternoon.
Invented and developed at Northwestern University, that tool is called a megalibrary. The world's first nanomaterial "data factory," each megalibrary contains millions of uniquely designed nanoparticles on one tiny chip. In collaboration with researchers from the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), the team used this technology to discover commercially relevant catalysts for hydrogen production. Then, they scaled up the material and demonstrated it could work within a device -- all in record time.
With a megalibrary, scientists rapidly screened vast combinations of four abundant, inexpensive metals -- each known for its catalytic performance -- to find a new material with performance comparable to iridium. The team discovered a wholly new material that, in laboratory experiments, matched or in some cases even exceeded the performance of commercial iridium-based materials, but at a fraction of the cost.
This discovery doesn't just make affordable green hydrogen a possibility; it also proves the effectiveness of the new megalibrary approach, which could completely change how researchers find new materials for any number of applications.
The study was published on August 19 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).
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