Joe Gauthier has been awarded a U.S. Department of Energy grant to study catalyst stability in hydrogen production.

Joseph Gauthier, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas Tech University’s Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College of Engineering, has been awarded a U.S. Department of Energy grant to study catalyst stability in hydrogen production.

The $736,933 grant comes from the DOE Basic Energy Sciences Catalysis Science program. Of the total award, $345,026 will go to Texas Tech, with the remaining $391,907 awarded to Northwestern University. Gauthier is collaborating with Linsey Seitz, an associate professor of chemical & biological engineering at Northwestern University.

The project titled “Identifying Structure-Property Relationships That Govern Stability and Catalytic Oxygen Evolution Activity on Crystalline and Amorphized IrOₓ ”, focuses on improving understanding of iridium oxide catalysts used in water splitting. The research seeks to determine how the local crystal structure impacts catalyst performance and long-term stability in electrochemical reactions that produce hydrogen.

Electrochemical water splitting using polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) systems has the potential to make hydrogen production more efficient, but widespread use is hindered in part by the high cost and limited durability of catalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction – the anode half of a water electrolyzer. Gauthier’s research group will use advanced computational modeling approaches to study how crystalline, paracrystalline, and amorphous forms of iridium oxide perform under industrially relevant conditions.

 “Real catalysts are complicated – they have defects, they reconstruct and corrode during operation, and they are rarely the perfectly crystalline materials that we model them as in simulations," said Gauthier. "This award from DOE BES Catalysis Science, in collaboration with Professor Linsey Seitz at Northwestern, will allow us to better understand how these imperfections affect material durability and catalytic activity. Our ultimate goal is to enable the development of technologies that produce low-cost hydrogen electrochemically while minimizing, or ideally eliminating, the need for expensive precious metal catalysts."

The work aims to close the gap between theoretical models and real-world catalyst behavior, with implications for hydrogen fuel technology and other industrial processes such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen reduction.