National Fuel Cell Research Center Director Iryna Zenyuk is striving to enable clean hydrogen to power everything from Olympic buses, trucks, the cement industry and more. A former chess champion, Zenyuk is a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at UC Irvine.

Transcript:

[Sound of electrolyzer]

[IRYNA ZENYUK: This is an electrolyzer, yeah]

[sci fi music]

NATALIE TSO, HOST: Today we’re at the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UC Irvine’s engineering school. The director Iryna Zenyuk is a UCI professor of chemical and biomolecular enagineering. Before getting into clean energy, she was a professional chess player, ranked in the top 5 in the US.

ZENYUK: My grandfather played chess and he introduced me when I was maybe four or five and then I showed actually some talent.

TSO: She was so talented, she went pro as an engineering student. She played in a life-changing tournament right after the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

ZENYUK: It was just a week after Olympic Games and the factories were just restarting. After a week it was already we couldn't see a few feet away. I never seen anything like that.

TSO: That’s when she decided clean energy was more important than chess. She left her chess career and is now a global leader in clean energy research.

ZENYUK: Now we have Olympic Games in LA in 2028 and we just organized the workshop to get hydrogen buses into the program. So it kind of for me it feels like full circle. I get a chance to impact what technology going to being there so that is also exciting for me now.

TSO: Zenyuk is working with colleagues from UC Irvine and UCLA to get hydrogen fuel cell buses to the 2028 Olympic Games.

Her lab at UC Irvine focuses on making clean hydrogen using electrolysis - where electricity splits water H20 into hydrogen and oxygen.

ZENYUK: This is electrolyzer yeah. It pumps water and it makes hydrogen. So this is the sound of pumping water that gets water to electrolyzer and then hydrogen comes out. So you can see some of this bubbles are hydrogen.

[TSO: The bubbles are hydrogen. That’s really cool.]

[Zenyuk laughs]

TSO: The roller mixer you hear now is mixing the catalyst for the chemical reaction that produces clean hydrogen.

ZENYUK: So this is a roll mill. We have bottles of ink, which is made of catalyst particles, ionomer, and water and solvent and they are rolled for 48 hours.

The catalyst is made from iridium. So that's where all the reactions take place. That's where water splits to make hydrogen on the surface on this catalyst.

TSO: Her lab is advancing hydrogen technology to power trucks, planes, ships, AI servers and the cement industry. She paired with UCI civil engineering professor Mo Li to create a way to decarbonize the production of cement.

ZENYUK: Cement industry uses 1600 degrees Celsius process to convert calcium carbonate to calcium oxide. We do it close to room temperature.

TSO: That eliminates the need for fossil fuels for that key process. Cement companies are taking notice.

ZENYUK: We already have inquiries from industry, from construction companies. They, they are interested in finding a way to decarbonize their processes. They are very interested in new technologies.

[sci fi music]

TSO: She also believes electrolysis has the potential to process and separate mined critical minerals which the nation really needs.

ZENYUK: We have to we have to sieve through a lot of water to extract those elements. And if you think of like they're typically in ionic. They are ions dispersed in solution and ions that charge species. So we can use electricity, electric potential. We can use different membranes, we can use different potential windows to separate certain metals and to leave all the other metals out.

There is a lot of innovation currently happening in this field and I think here at UCI, we can position ourselves to be really leader in this field as well.

TSO: Looks like Zenyuk’s mastermind is always thinking about the next move. You’ll want to keep an eye on her lab at UCI’s National Fuel Cell Research Center.

Thanks for tuning into The Lab Beat, brought to you by the UC Irvine Samueli School of Engineering. I’m Natalie Tso. If you like our podcast, please share it with your friends. Thanks and see at the next lab.

(Season 1, Episode 5)