IIT Gandhinagar study: disordered carbon material could cut green hydrogen catalyst costs

Researchers at IIT Gandhinagar used computational methods to study monolayer amorphous carbon (MAC) as a possible metal-free catalyst for green hydrogen production. The material's disordered atomic structure creates many active sites for splitting water, unlike pristine graphene's regular hexagonal pattern. By combining density functional theory with a machine-learned potential, the team screened about 1,183 hydrogen adsorption sites on MAC. Roughly 15% showed adsorption energy below +0.25 eV, close to the ideal value for releasing hydrogen easily. That could reduce dependence on scarce metals such as platinum and iridium in electrolyzers. The work supports India's National Green Hydrogen Mission and the Clean Hydrogen Mission's goal of cutting clean hydrogen costs to $2 per kilogram by 2030. Experimental validation is still needed before the material can be used in real devices.