Hydration effects in gels for water splitting.

DOI

Storing the energy available from the sun as a fuel that can be used anytime is a major global challenge. Organic materials synthesised from abundant elements that can harness solar energy are being widely researched. Our approach is to use some of these materials (perylene bisimides) in a photo-electrochemical cell to split water into oxygen and hydrogen that can be stored as a gas and used whenever necessary. These materials are made using self-assembly to form gels that can either be used directly as wet materials or dried and re-hydrated for better stability. Using small angle neutron scattering we will investigate where and how well water is located in the gel and dried gel materials. Neutrons can detect the difference between water and heavy water, which we will exploit to obtain information about where the water is located when the gel is re-hydrated.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.87813791
Metadata Access https://icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk/oaipmh/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk:inv/87813791
Provenance
Creator Dr Laura Mears; Professor Dave Adams; Miss Charlotte Smith; Dr James Doutch; Professor Alex Cowan
Publisher ISIS Neutron and Muon Source
Publication Year 2020
Rights CC-BY Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Contact isisdata(at)stfc.ac.uk
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Discipline Chemistry; Natural Sciences
Temporal Coverage Begin 2017-10-13T08:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2017-10-16T08:01:27Z