Ziqing won the price for best hydrogen related paper of 2025! Her paper on detecting hydrogen at low temperatures published in Advanced Functional Materials won the price: https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.202420087Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Into the cold with hydrogen leak detection
Hydrogen is becoming important as a clean energy carrier, enabling storage and transport of renewable energy for hard-to-electrify sectors. Its high flammability, however, makes leak detection under all operational conditions essential for safety. At room temperature, optical hydrogen sensors using metal hydrides have emerged as a cheap, reliable and fast solution. But what about the low temperatures encountered by planes at cruising altitude, or by vehicles and storage systems in Arctic conditions? Ziqing Yuan investigated the performance of four such hydrogen sensing materials down to −60 °C, including looking into structural changes at the nanometre scale. Even at these temperatures, the materials could not only detect hydrogen but also differentiate between very low and high concentrations. One of them could even signal a dangerous level in just six seconds – a record at this temperature. Her insights open the door to hydrogen sensors that work faster and under even more extreme conditions. She thereby brings the hydrogen-powered future ever closer, no matter the temperature.
TU Delft Optical Hydrogen Sensing & Thin Film Energy Materials 
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