A new way to produce hydrogen 'discovered'

Washington: Scientists have discovered what they claim is a new way to produce hydrogen "by exposing selected clusters of aluminium atoms to water".
"Our previous research suggested that electronic properties govern everything about these aluminium clusters, but this new study shows that it is the arrangement of atoms within the clusters that allows them to split water.
"Generally, this knowledge might allow us to design new nanoscale catalysts by changing the arrangements of atoms in a cluster. The results could open up a new area of research not only related to splitting water, but also to breaking the bonds of other molecules, as well," lead scientist Evan Pugh of Penn State University said.
In their study, the scientists probed the reactions of water with individual aluminium clusters by combining them under controlled conditions in a custom-designed flow-reactor.
They found that a water molecule will bind between two aluminium sites in a cluster as long as one of the sites behaves like a Lewis acid, a positively charged centre that wants to accept an electron, and the other behaves like a Lewis base, a negatively charged centre that wants to give away an electron.