Hydrogen production by splitting water on solid acid materials by thermal dissociation

Conventionally, there have been three basic ways of research on H₂ production from H₂O-splitting with solar energy: photo-catalytic, photo-electrochemical and thermochemical. Among them the thermal dissociation of H₂O has been considered the most efficient, because it is a single step energy conversion process and gives much higher conversion efficiency than those resulted from other methods. However, the major stumbling block of thermal dissociation of H₂O has been the requirement of a high dissociation temperature which causes problems both with materials for the reactor and with energy conversion efficiency for the process. In this study, we show that the dissociation temperature can be drastically lowered when H₂O is thermally dissociated on solid acid materials. A probable mechanism of the thermal H₂O-splitting on solid acid materials is also presented, based on some experimental results of this study and reports in the literature.