Since joining Technion my research has focused on ceramic materials for energy application, on nitrogen-based fuels and on hydrogen generation from water. In my vision, I see efficient large-scale production and storage of green hydrogen using renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind. Such storage includes pure hydrogen and utilizing nitrogen and carbon as hydrogen carriers in the form of hydrocarbons, ammonia and its derivatives.
In the past 10 years, I embarked on a study of the reaction mechanism, kinetics and economics of nitrogen based fuels such as ammonia, urea and ammonium nitrate. This led to more than 15 articles since 2014 unraveling the auto ignition temperature, rate limiting reactions, and economic analysis of these fuels vs. their carbon analogs. A paper published in Angewandte Chemie (2016) demonstrates that ammonia is the most efficient synthetic fuel on an energy basis. Later, a paper published in Applied Energy (2017) shows the economic for a nitrogen economy.
My journey on hydrogen generation started with a drive to decouple photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting, in a way that removes the need for membranes, allowing O2 production at a solar field while H2 is made elsewhere. This work was published in Nature Materials (2017), and Joule (2020). Next we found that the Ni(OH)2 anode can be regenerated by heating, and devised a new scheme to split water in an E-TAC cycle, where H2 and O2 generation is decoupled in time. This work was patented and published in Nature Energy (2019).
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