LOS ANGELES, Oct. 17 (Xinhua) -- A new design by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the northeastern U.S. state of Massachusetts, could harness up to 40 percent of the Sun's heat to produce clean hydrogen fuel, the team announced in a study published on Monday.
In the study published in Solar Energy Journal, the MIT engineers lay out the conceptual design for the system that can efficiently produce "solar thermochemical hydrogen."
The system harnesses the Sun's heat to directly split water and generate hydrogen -- a clean fuel that can power long-distance trucks, ships, and planes, while in the process emitting no greenhouse gas emissions.
Conventional systems for producing hydrogen depend on fossil fuels, but the new system uses only solar energy.
"We're thinking of hydrogen as the fuel of the future, and there's a need to generate it cheaply and at scale," said the study's lead author, Ahmed Ghoniem, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. ■