‘Ideal’ water splitting catalysts actually exist, simulations find

Splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen has the potential to fuel the global economy more sustainably, but the technology is held back by the bottleneck of oxidising water to molecular oxygen. Now, a group of researchers from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, led by Max García-Melchor, think they have found a way to overcome this hurdle. Using computational models that were traditionally exclusive to heterogeneous processes, they analysed a series of homogeneous oxygen evolution catalysts, and predict that the idea of an ideal catalyst isn’t fantasy and would make water splitting cheaper and more efficient.