Acid coating converts regular electrolyzers to split seawater

An international team from the University of Adelaide, Australia, Tianjin and Nankai Universities in China and Kent State University in the US has published new research claiming that a simple, cheap acid layer over the catalyst in an electrolyzer allows it to split seawater with “nearly 100 per cent efficiency,” without any pre-treatment other than filtering.A typical electrolyzer catalyst, says the team, might be made from cobalt oxide, with chromium oxide on its surface. Seawater would generally ruin these catalysts via severe erosion due to chlorine ions, or gunk them up with insoluble precipitations of magnesium and calcium, which build up and block the electrodes.But the addition of a Lewis acid layer on the catalyst, it seems, was able to capture enough negatively charged hydroxyl anions from the seawater to generate a powerfully alkaline environment with a pH of 14 around the…

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