Helen Knight, technology reporter
(Image: Design Pics Inc/Rex Features)
Why come up with new ways to generate clean energy, when we can copy what plants have been doing for millennia?
Daniel Nocera and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claim to have done just that - developing the first practical artificial leaf that mimics photosynthesis.
The leaf, actually a cheap, playing-card-sized solar cell that uses energy from sunlight to generate electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, was presented yesterday at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim, California. The hydrogen and oxygen produced could then be fed into a fuel cell, to generate electricity when it's needed.
In 2008 Nocera coated a low-cost indium-tin-oxide electrode in a combination of cobalt and phosphate to catalyse the water-splitting process.
Last year the team revealed an even cheaper water-splitting device based on a cobalt and nickel-borate-based electrode. In tests their artificial leaf, based on that cobalt-nickel electrode, operated continuously for over 45 hours without a drop in production.
By using cheap, abundant materials, Nocera hopes to ultimately develop a device that could power a home in the developing world for a day using just 4 litres of water. His company, Sun Catalytix, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is attempting to commercialise the artificial photosynthesis technology.
Indian firm Tata has already signed Nocera up to help develop a mini-power plant based on his technology.
The breakthrough comes as four reserach teams from the UK and USA have today been awarded funding totalling $10.3million to improve the process of natural photosynthesis. The teams are looking at technologies to overcome limitations in photosynthesis - such as natural bottlenecks in the proicess - which could then lead to ways of increasing the yield of important crops for food production or sustainable bioenergy.
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