NewHydrogen, a BioSolar corporation, presented an update on the advancement of its green hydrogen technologies through a funded research collaboration with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The company recently revealed that it had executed a deal, replacing the predecessor, to tenfold the testing activities.

The original funded research program at UCLA centered on replacing the oxygen catalyst, iridium, a precious metal found only in asteroids, with low-cost, earth-abundant materials that equal or surpass iridium’s efficiency characteristics.

The aim is to create low-cost, durable materials that can catalyze the electrochemical oxygen evolution reaction (OER) while still achieving high-performance water electrolysis for hydrogen processing.

For preliminary assessments, a baseline non-precious metal-based OER catalyst was recently selected and optimized. After changing its physical parameters and conditions to exhibit the strongest material properties, the catalyst was successfully synthesized. The catalyst content was characterized using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) studies at each iteration.

Electrochemical experiments were also carried out to ensure that the catalyst content was also a successful starting point for future improvements. Comprehensive testing of the baseline catalyst content provided the researchers with strong conviction that there would be plenty of space for development by substituting a portion of the original metal element in the baseline material structure.

“We are very pleased to see the progress being made in our green hydrogen program at UCLA. We have great confidence in Dr. Huang and her team, and are very pleased with what they have accomplished in such a short period of time. While these updates are more technical in nature, we will continue to make the public and broader capital markets aware of the technology objectives and critical steps of the process.”
Spencer Hall, COO of NewHydrogen.