Clean Fuel Breakthrough Turns Water Into Hydrogen at Room Temperature

[JHB]

5. Apparently you can get the nanoparticles from simple manual mixing

Here's a press release closer to the source, and more technically oriented:

https://news.ucsc.edu/2022/02/hydrogen-production.html

For years, researchers have tried to find efficient and cost-effective ways to use aluminum’s reactivity to generate clean hydrogen fuel. A new study by researchers at UC Santa Cruz shows that an easily produced composite of gallium and aluminum creates aluminum nanoparticles that react rapidly with water at room temperature to yield large amounts of hydrogen. The gallium was easily recovered for reuse after the reaction, which yields 90% of the hydrogen that could theoretically be produced from reaction of all the aluminum in the composite.

“We don’t need any energy input, and it bubbles hydrogen like crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it,” said UCSC Chemistry Professor Scott Oliver.

Oliver and Bakthan Singaram, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, are corresponding authors of a paper on the new findings, published February 14 in Applied Nano Materials.
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In this gallium-rich composite, the gallium serves both to dissolve the aluminum oxide coating and to separate the aluminum into nanoparticles. “The gallium separates the nanoparticles and keeps them from aggregating into larger particles,” Singaram said. “People have struggled to make aluminum nanoparticles, and here we are producing them under normal atmospheric pressure and room temperature conditions.” Making the composite required nothing more than simple manual mixing. “Our method uses a small amount of aluminum, which ensures it all dissolves into the majority gallium as discrete nanoparticles,” Oliver said. “This generates a much larger amount of hydrogen, almost complete compared to the theoretical value based on the amount of aluminum. It also makes gallium recovery easier for reuse.”

The paper itself was published in ACS Applied Nano Materials, but as a peer-reviewed journal article it's not aimed at a general audience (and it's not open access, so there's a paywall for the main body of the paper).
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsanm.1c04331