Water electrolysis is a key technology to establish CO₂-neutral hydrogen production. One of the key technological hurdles is the design of stable, active and affordable catalysts for the anodic oxygen evolution reaction (OER), which is one bottleneck of the hydrogen production process. Researchers from the Interface Science Department have now provided quantitative near-surface structural insights into oxygen-evolving CoO_x(OH)_y nanoparticles which are published in Nature Energy today.

The way how molecules involved in chemical reactions bind to the surface of a catalyst is key to understand and improve the catalyst’s performance. Researchers from the Fritz Haber Institute and the Danish Aarhus University have now developed a machine learning algorithm that can predict this important property for complex molecules that can bind to the surface in multiple motives.
 

Researchers at the NOMAD Laboratory at the Fritz Haber Institute have been engaged in describing how surfaces change in contact with reactive gas phases under different temperature and pressure conditions. For this purpose, they have developed the so-called replica exchange grand canonical method (REGC). The results were published in the journal Physical Review Letters on 17 June.

"The Scientist Who Killed Millions and Saved Billions" is a new Youtube clip about chemist and Nobel laureate Fritz Haber that shows the ambivalent impact of our founding director and namesake.

In addition to the climate crisis, the Ukraine war and the threat of gas shortages provide further arguments to get out of fossil fuels as quickly as possible and, above all, to become independent of Russian gas and oil supplies. In August, an interview with Robert Schlögl, Director at the Fritz Haber Institute, on the current energy situation has been published on the website of the Max Planck Society.