The Canadian Light Source on the USask campus came in handy for research from a McGill University team looking at clean energy sources. Dr. Marta Cerrutti explains that hydrogen is one of the clean energy options, and their research looks at producing hydrogen from the oceans.

First, the seawater needs to be separated into hydrogen and oxygen through an electric catalyst, and then there needs to be a way to filter the hydrogen from what’s in the water, including salt, which is sodium and chloride.

The filter that the team wanted to test at the CLS is made up of a stack of microscopic graphene sheets, which have even tinier holes that only the hydrogen can pass through.  They were successful, and now the challenge is scaling up to produce a larger industrial-sized filter.

Cerutti says the CLS allows them to do material analysis they wouldn’t have access to otherwise. The other members of the research team are Gabriele Capilli, Yiwen Chen, and Thomas Szkopek.