Iowa’s SunHydrogen, a developer of a technology to produce renewable hydrogen using sunlight and water, says it will work with a South Korean company on electroplating solutions to optimize its equipment in a scale-up process.
Tim YoungSunHydrogen says it reached a memorandum of understanding with Cotec to “explore the development and optimization of industrial electroplating solutions for SunHydrogen’s semiconductor deposition, a fundamental component of the company’s nanoparticle technology.”
Cotec performs electroplating and electrochemical processes, has extensive plating expertise across the aerospace, automotive, defense, and nuclear industries, and has worked with high-level clients such as Boeing, Hanwha, Airbus, and more.
SunHydrogen CEO Tim Young says within one of their hydrogen generators, billions of patented photoelectrosynthetically active heterostructure (PAH) nanoparticles per square centimeter split apart water to generate hydrogen and oxygen. These PAH nanoparticles are composed of multiple layers of solar cells; the high-voltage, high-light absorbing properties of the solar cells enable the company to make them ultrathin and with significantly fewer materials, lowering costs and raising efficiency.
Young says SunHydrogen and Cotec will explore the development and implementation of electroplating solutions to translate the existing PAH architecture and process to manufacturing scale while maintaining low cost and high efficiency.
“As SunHydrogen has built relationships with a growing group of industrial partners over the past several years, we’ve learned that our scale-up process is most effective when we take a diversified approach that allows for specialized expertise to be directed to the many individual components of our technology,” Young says.
He says this is evidenced by their recent announcement of the approval of $3.1 million in funding for Project NanoPEC, a 3-year initiative that will bring us together with six partners in Germany to accelerate their scale-up process.
“At lab scale, our team has consistently reached favorable photovoltage and photocurrent densities, but our current challenge is translating this success to larger scales,” Young says. “It is this challenge that we believe companies like Cotex – and our partners in Germany – can help us overcome.”
Young and SunHydrogen’s Director of Technology, Dr. Joun Lee, both made visits to Cotec’s Changwon facility in 2023, and this week, members of Cotec’s team visited SunHydrogen’s Iowa headquarters to sign the agreement and visit SunHydrogen’s laboratory. Earlier in the year, COTEC demonstrated to SunHydrogen their ability to electrodeposit materials at the nanoscale.
“We believe this opportunity holds significant potential for SunHydrogen and Cotec to collaborate on the development of industrial electroplating solutions,” said Ju-Won Choi, Cotec’s CEO and Chairman. “This Memorandum of Understanding represents a shared commitment to accelerating the global adoption of green hydrogen as a clean and renewable energy source.”
SunHydrogen is developing breakthrough technologies to make, store and use green hydrogen in a market that Goldman Sachs estimates to be worth $12 trillion by 2050. Its patented SunHydrogen Panel technology is currently in development and uses sunlight and any source of water to produce low-cost green hydrogen. Similar to solar panels that produce electricity, the SunHydrogen Panels produce green hydrogen.
Visit www.SunHydrogen.com.
