SAN ANTONIO — March 25, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has launched the newest iteration of its industry-supported Hydrogen Internal Combustion Engine consortium, H₂-ICE2.

While hydrogen production technologies are gaining attraction for a sustainable energy transition, traditional water electrolysis is challenged by its high voltage requirements. To overcome this limitation, chemical water-assisted electrolysis is emerging as a promising alternative. This technology replaces the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) of traditional water electrolysis with various chemical oxidation reactions to produce hydrogen at lower voltages. In addition, it can generate high-value products or remove pollutants in the process, enabling simultaneous energy production and environmental improvement.

However, compared to the thermodynamic potential, the actual driving potential is still high due to overpotential problems. This review presents the latest catalyst design strategies aimed at addressing the high overpotential issues associated with five chemical water-assisted electrolysis reactions, including ammonia, alcohol, urea, hydrazine, and biomass. These strategies contribute to reducing overpotential while simultaneously enhancing long-term stability, demonstrating potential as a clean hydrogen production technology. This work was published on February 24, 2025, in Industrial Chemistry & Materials.

Researchers have determined that six gas valves provide the best protection against plasma disruptions in SPARC, a next-generation, experimental fusion system. By refining the setup for the fusion vessel’s massive gas injection system, researchers are ensuring that disruptions — sudden jets of plasma that can damage the fusion vessel’s inner walls — are controlled efficiently, paving the way for safer, more robust fusion power plants.

This a robot can walk, without electronics, and only with the addition of a cartridge of compressed gas, right off the 3D-printer. It can also be printed in one go, from one material.  Researchers describe their work in an advanced online publication in the journal Advanced Intelligent Systems.

Researchers have developed a novel ternary electrolyte system combining ionic liquids (ILs) with water-in-salt (WIS) technology, significantly enhancing the high-temperature stability and voltage capacity of aqueous potassium-ion supercapacitors. The optimized electrolyte achieves a record-breaking 3.37 V electrochemical window and maintains 87.6% capacitance after 2000 cycles at 60°C, offering a breakthrough for energy storage in electric vehicles and industrial applications.

A team from The University of Osaka has created nickel(0)-boron bonds in square-planar complexes. The researchers prepared and characterized nickel complexes containing tris(perfluoroaryl)boranes and showed that the bulky Z-type ligands formed stable bonds that were supported by noncovalent interactions with the other ligands in the complexes. This first for nickel and boron is expected to open new avenues in catalysis for the synthesis of high-value products such as pharmaceuticals and polymers.