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We are making hydrogen peroxide in devices for cleaning water and disinfecting – but we are all electro-chemists, and people who do electro-chemistry usually hate hydrogen peroxide because it’s an undesired product - in a fuel cell, it degrades membranes. But when we’ve been talking to people from the industry, they’ve said it’s a dream reaction to be able to make hydrogen peroxide in a continuous manner and on a localised basis.

In order to get the output and the best collaboration it’s important to work in a big group like we did. It would only really be possible through collaboration rather than one researcher or research department.

The good thing about electro-chemistry is that it involves both physics and chemistry, but when you start to design the whole concept, there’s a whole lot of mechanical engineering that comes out on top. We had to try and think about that intuitively and making that design was a big challenge, but very interesting at the same time.

At the moment, we have products at HPNow that can deliver 1-5kg per day. But we need to make larger systems, and over the next year we plan to scale up to about 100 kilos a day and also increase the concentration significantly above 0.3%. From a high level, we want to challenge the way that hydrogen peroxide is being produced and sold, looking at the storage, supply chain and the dangers that are involved. We are really focused on developing the technology to a stage where it’s really a no-brainer for the sustainable method of production.

Hydrogen peroxide is a benign chemical oxidant, and it has a lot of applications from industry to household. There are lots of areas that hydrogen peroxide can be useful. The current pandemic situation is a good example of how hydrogen peroxide can be useful for sterilisation and sanitisation.
Another area is waste water treatment in remote areas, particularly when there is no capital waste water treatment in place.

Chemistry is all about making and breaking bonds, and if you have the chemical intuition to know how to control that process of creating and breaking bonds, then you have the ability to control their reaction.  

The first thing to do is make sure you have persistence and patience – it can be a slow process to get to a result. Also, write down your ideas! There are so many ideas that float around your mind, but it’s easy to forget them.

For many of the challenges humanity is facing, they are going to be solved with chemistry. If you think about sustainable chemicals and sustainable fuels, a lot of the transition towards a more sustainable system is related to chemical science.
This project however will change the way we are using chemicals, because this way of providing hydrogen peroxide may actually enable people to use the chemical in a way they hadn’t before.

One of the main things that inspires me is to see that in principal, what you are working on can be useful in the real world. Sometimes, you get inspiration because you have understood something or you have shared a valuable insight.