Magnets might enhance oxygen manufacturing in house

In house, bubble bother hampers oxygen manufacturing wanted for astronauts to breathe. But neodymium magnets could coax bubbles off electrodes in microgravity to spice up the effectivity of splitting water (Nat. Chem. 2025, DOI: 10.1038/s41557-025-01890-0).

“Magnetic fields are breathing new life into electrocatalysis because they’re simple to apply and work with almost any catalyst,” says Magalí Lingenfelder, a bodily chemist on the Helvetia Institute for Science and Innovation who wasn’t concerned with the work. In house, she says, “this becomes a real game changer.”

Astronauts breathe oxygen produced by electrolyzing water, which splits it into hydrogen and oxygen in an electrochemical cell. At the electrodes, hydrogen gasoline or oxygen gasoline coalesces into bubbles. On Earth, these bubbles would float up and away. But on orbiting spacecraft, the place all the things is in perpetual free fall, there’s no buoyancy to carry the bubbles. Instead, pumps ship the combo to a centrifuge that separates gases from liquid water.

It’s an advanced, energy-intensive system whose unreliability requires astronauts to maintain spare elements available, says Álvaro Romero-Calvo, an aerospace engineer on the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Romero-Calvo and colleagues used magnetism to govern the electrochemistry in two methods.

The first means depends on water’s diamagnetism, or its tendency to be weakly repelled by a everlasting magnet. “In the presence of a magnetic field,” Romero-Calvo says, “there is a tiny little force that you don’t see on Earth but in space becomes dominant.” Water shifting away from the magnet displaces the gases, that are much less vulnerable to magnetism.

The second arises from the interplay between the exterior magnet’s discipline and people of the ions shifting underneath {the electrical} discipline. “As these charges diffuse or move in the liquid, in the presence of a magnetic field, we are inducing an effect called Lorentz force,” says Ömer Akay, a physicist on the University of Bremen and the examine’s lead creator. The Lorentz pressure can even steer the water’s circulation.

The researchers examined these results in microgravity by launching their experimental setup 120 m up within the Bremen drop tower, which provides 9.3 s of free fall.

Images of the free-falling cells fitted with industrial neodymium magnets present that magnetically induced forces tug gasoline bubbles away from their electrodes, releasing up response websites. With magnets, the response’s present density elevated by some 240% versus with out magnets.

The workforce additionally examined ring-shaped prototypes with a magnet across the circumference. In microgravity, the Lorentz pressure causes the water to swirl and the bubbles to maneuver towards the middle, the place they are often extracted. “This is a centrifuge—only that this centrifuge doesn’t require a pump,” Romero-Calvo says.

“That’s a very clever addition to the toolbox that engineers have now to control bubbles,” says David Fernandez Rivas, a chemical and biomedical engineer on the University of Twente who was not a part of the work. This form of work helps reveal elementary data about electrochemical processes that might inform designs for electrodes and reactors for different reactions that is also helpful on Earth, he says. The workforce demonstrated, along with oxygen manufacturing, comparable however much less pronounced results on light-driven hydrogen manufacturing from a photoelectrochemical cell.

In chemical engineering, “there’s this assumption that everything has been invented—there’s not much to really innovate,” Fernandez Rivas says. Magnets are one device to regulate processes on the microscale, the place there’s but so much to discover, he says. “We actually can improve a lot of electrochemical processes by controlling the microscale.”