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Salty Silicon Synthesis: Enabling Fast and Scalable Hydrogen Generation from Porous Silicon

2025· article· en· W7106250568 on OpenAlexafffund

Bibliographic record

VenueEnergy & Fuels · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMaterials Science
TopicSilicon Nanostructures and Photoluminescence
Canadian institutionsDalhousie University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaResearch Nova ScotiaKillam TrustsCanada Foundation for Innovation
KeywordsSiliconHydrogen productionHydrogenPorous siliconScrapEtching (microfabrication)AluminiumPorosityHydrofluoric acid

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Porous silicon (p-Si) is a promising material for diverse green energy applications, including its use as a negative electrode in lithium-ion batteries, solar-driven fuel production, and on-demand hydrogen generation. Conventional production methods involve the use of hydrofluoric acid etching of bulk Si or magnesiothermic reduction of silica, which are limited by hazards, wastefulness, or risk of thermal runaway. Aluminum metal offers a safer, more sustainable alternative to magnesium, as it is abundant in scrap sources and easily recycled. However, existing aluminothermic reduction methods typically require AlCl 3 salt, which is volatile, difficult to recycle, and demands long reaction times. This study explores a salt-mediated approach using a 1:1 weight mixture of NaCl and KCl to facilitate the reduction of fumed SiO 2 with aluminum metal. This process yields ∼83% p-Si after just 1 h at 850 °C. The resulting material exhibits high reactivity, producing up to 1476 ± 51 mL of hydrogen per gram of Si within ∼5 min, using various water sources including seawater. These findings demonstrate a safer, faster, and more scalable route to functional p-Si for on-demand hydrogen generation and other sustainable energy applications.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.001
Threshold uncertainty score0.003

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.011
GPT teacher head0.222
Teacher spread0.212 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designBench or experimental
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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