Executive Summary : | The energy conversion technologies, like electrocatalytic water splitting producing green hydrogen has been widely studied for fuel cell application offering zero emission to the environment. Often, electrocatalytic water splitting is carried out using fresh water. The scarcity of water in current days cannot be ignored, as hundreds of millions of people across India are in water crisis. Moreover, the survey indicates the fact that over 62000 million litres sewage water per day is being generated in India, in which the major contribution comes from the industrial effluent followed by domestic wastewater and agriculture run-off. As per the record, only 25-30% sewage water is being treated and a huge amount of sewage water remain untreated, rather it pollutes fresh water. Other than wastewater, seawater is considered to be the biggest hydrogen reservoir and 97% of earth surface water comes from seawater. However, the use of seawater still remain as a great challenge due to interference of corrosive chlorine electrochemistry. Knowing the fact that 70% of the earth surface is covered by seawater, use of seawater for energy conversion to get clean fuel is a highly ambitious aim to be fulfilled. Thereby, this is high time to say ‘No’ to the use of fresh water and explore the possibility of using wastewater and seawater for hydrogen production by electrocatalytic water splitting. Indeed, the presence of multiple elements including toxic heavy metals, corrosive chlorides and organic pollutants make the job very challenging. To avoid corrosive chlorine generation and effective oxidation of organic pollutants in the anode, rational designing of electrocatalyst will be one of the most desired objectives. To address this target of using low-grade water and seawater for green hydrogen production, the following approaches have been proposed: 1. Designing and development of OER selective electrocatalyst over CER mechanism in seawater and wastewater. 2. The use of wastewater and seawater in place of fresh water for sustainable hydrogen production. 3. The urea electro-oxidation for hydrogen production from wastewater with energy saving pathway. 4. Electro-flocculation process as pre-treatment for oil contaminated wastewater prior to splitting into hydrogen and oxygen. The following major experiments will be included in the proposed work: 1. Boosting electrocatalytic activity for OER designing suitable electrocatalyst. 2. Strategies to block chlorides in seawater and wastewater without expensive desalination process. 3. Green Hydrogen by Seawater Splitting 4. Hydrogen Production directly from Wastewater and Urea Sewage 5. Electro-flocculation process prior to wastewater splitting for oil contaminated wastewater. |