I am working on photocatalytic water splitting. but I don't have the setup to measure the hydrogen output . can I made it myself? I want to read about setup. kindly give some idea about it. where can I take help in India if I want to see the setup?
Better to read many papers, they provide a schematic diagram of the photocatalytic H2 production set-up being used in their particular work.
But all in all you need three key things: A gas chromatography, a photoreactor, and a light source.
For GC: Be careful in selecting the carrier gas, don't use He because He and H2 have almost similar retention time due to their similar thermal conductivities. Instead, use N2 or Ar. Detectors are TCD and PLOT column. Calibrate the GC and it is good to go.
Photoreactor: Usually a quartz reactor with septums for purging. It is always customized for photocatalytic H2 production and hence there is no fixed design. The only thing is it must be leak-proof and be able to absorb light. If its an online GC set-up then reactor design varies or else if it's offline then septum provided can be used for extracting out the products via gas-tight syringe.
Light source: It depends on catalyst to catalyst and experimental conditions. One can use only visible light spectrum or AM1.5. The solar simulator can serve both the purpose where you can use a cut-off filter to make the light source limited to the visible spectrum and if not then it simulates the entire solar light.
Miscellaneous: These include decent plumbing in the lab where you are connecting all your gases with your GC.
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