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Electrocatalytic splitting of water by means of renewable energy as the electricity supply is one of the most promising methods for storing green renewable energy as hydrogen. Although two-thirds of the earth's surface is covered with water, there is inadequacy of freshwater in most parts of the world. Hence, splitting seawater instead of freshwater could be a truly sustainable alternative. However, direct seawater splitting faces challenges because of the complex composition of seawater. The composition, and hence, the local chemistry of seawater may vary depending on its origin, and in most cases, tracking of the side reactions and standardizing and customizing the catalytic process will be an extra challenge. The corrosion of catalysts and competitive side reactions due to the presence of various inorganic and organic pollutants create challenges for developing stable electro-catalysts. Hence, seawater splitting generally involves a two-step process, i.e., purification of seawater using reverse osmosis and then subsequent fresh water splitting. However, this demands two separate chambers and larger space, and increases complexity of the reactor design. Recently, there have been efforts to directly split seawater without the reverse osmosis step. Herein, we represent the most recent innovative approaches to avoid the two-step process, and compare the potential application of membrane-assisted and membrane-less electrolyzers in direct seawater splitting (DSS). We particularly discuss the device engineering, and propose a novel electrolyzer design strategies for concentration gradient based membrane-less microfluidic electrolyzer.

The switch from a carbon-based to a hydrogen-based economy requires environmentally friendly methods for hydrogen production. CO2-reforming of methane promises to be a greener alternative to steam-methane reforming, which accounts for the majority of hydrogen production today. For this dry process to become industrially competitive, challenges such as catalyst deactivation and degradation through coke formation must be better understood and ultimately overcome. While bulk characterisation methods provide a wealth of useful information about the carbon formed during coking, spatially resolved techniques are required to understand the type and extent of degradation of supported catalyst particles themselves under coking conditions. Here, lab-based X-ray nano-computed tomography, in conjunction with a range of complementary techniques, is utilised to understand the effects of the nickel-to-cobalt ratio on the degradation of individual supported catalyst particles. Findings suggest that a bimetallic system greatly outperforms monometallic catalysts, with the ratio between nickel and cobalt having a significant impact on the type and quantity of the carbon formed and on the extent of supported catalyst breakdown.

The potential of acoustic signatures to be used for State-of-Charge (SoC) estimation is demonstrated using artificial neural network regression models. This approach represents a streamlined method of processing the entire acoustic waveform instead of performing manual, and often arbitrary, waveform peak selection. For applications where computational economy is prioritised, simple metrics of statistical significance are used to formally identify the most informative waveform features. These alone can be exploited for SoC inference. It is further shown that signal portions representing both early and late interfacial reflections can correlate highly with the SoC and be of predictive value, challenging the more common peak selection methods which focus on the latter. Although later echoes represent greater through-thickness coverage, and are intuitively more information-rich, their presence is not guaranteed. Holistic waveform treatment offers a more robust approach to correlating acoustic signatures to electrochemical states. It is further demonstrated that transformation into the frequency domain can reduce the dimensionality of the problem significantly, while also improving the estimation accuracy. Most importantly, it is shown that acoustic signatures can be used as sole model inputs to produce highly accurate SoC estimates, without any complementary voltage information. This makes the method suitable for applications where redundancy and diversification of SoC estimation approaches is needed. Data is obtained experimentally from a 210 mAh LiCoO2/graphite pouch cell. Mean estimation errors as low as 0.75% are achieved on a SoC scale of 0–100%.

Hydrogen is one of the most attractive renewables for future energy application, therefore it is vital to develop cost-effective and highly-efficient electrocatalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) to promote the generation of hydrogen from mild methods. In this work, Co–Mo phosphide nanosheets with the adjustable ratio of Co and Mo were fabricated on carbon cloth by a facile hydrothermal-annealing method. Owing to the unique nanostructures, abundant active surfaces and small resistance were achieved. Excellent electrocatalytic performances are obtained, such as the small overpotential of ∼67.3 mV to realize a current density of 10 mA cm−2 and a Tafel slope of 69.9 mV dec−1. Rapid recovery of the current response under multistep chronoamperometry is realized and excellent stability retained after the CV test for 2000 cycles. The change of electronic states of different elements was carefully studied which suggested the optimal electrochemical performance can be realized by tuning phosphorous and metal interactions.

The development of the underpinning methodology for the production of robust, well-formed, and densely packed biotin-HPDP functionalised gold surfaces, the crucial first step in immobilising bimolecules on surfaces, is described. Self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) with biotin end-groups were prepared on polycrystalline gold surfaces according to a published method. The layers formed were studied using cyclic voltammetry to determine the composition of the layer and its quality. Crystal impedance spectroscopy was also applied as a complimentary indicator of the composition of the layer.For the first time, the effect of assembly time on the properties of the layer was studied along with the composition of the layer and the ability of the precursor molecule to self-assemble by oxidative addition.