Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Industries have not widely used the water splitting process, however, because of the prohibitive cost of the precious metal catalysts that are required -- usually platinum or ruthenium.
Many of the methods to split water also require too much energy, or the required materials break down too quickly. Instead, industries generally use a fossil-fuel based process to produce hydrogen for fuel cells, which generates harmful greenhouse gas emissions.
For their catalyst, the WSU research team added nanoparticles of relatively inexpensive copper to a cobalt-based framework. The new catalyst was able to conduct electricity better than the commonly used precious metal catalysts. It produced oxygen better than existing commercial catalysts and produced hydrogen at a comparable rate.
so my question is can we use any other nanoparticle for this spitting purpose?

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