Highly Porous Multifunctional Catalytic H2 Production and CO2 Reduction
By Shivalingayya Gaddimath
As the world’s appetite for energy grows and the planet grapples with rising environmental adversity, scientists and engineers are racing to develop clean and green energy solutions to sustain contemporary society. In the past few years, energy consumption has dramatically increased, and energy demand is expected to increase by 3 times by 2050. Fuel cells, metal-air batteries, and Li-CO2 batteries are at the forefront of this effort to meet today’s energy demand without compromising the needs of future generations. The primary reactions oxygen reduction, oxygen evolution, hydrogen evolution, and CO2 reduction can advance the renewable energy technologies but all of them necessitates the industry scale development of advanced materials as efficient catalysts. The development of low cost, high earth abundant electrocatalysts via simpler and reliable process will pave the way for tomorrow's green energy fulfilment for catalyzing water electrolysis for hydrogen production and CO2 conversion into fuels. In this perspective, the potential of catalysis applications in energy and environment has attracted researchers and industries to work together to improve the present catalytic materials as well as search for new classes of catalytic materials. Considering the crucial role of materials in green transition, this PhD project aims to develop tetrapods based novel class of highly porous 3D functional materials and investigate their catalysis responses. The major focus is to explore the appropriate material designs and combinations to demonstrate high catalytic performance with respect to hydrogen/oxygen evolution reaction (HER/OER), CO2 capture and conversion processes.
Supervisor: Yogendra Kumar Mishra
Spin State-Engineered Magnetic Catalyst for Water Oxidation Under External Magnetic Field
(funded by the Danish Advanced Research Academy (DARA) PhD Fellowship)
By Linh Truong
The growing demand for sustainable energy has accelerated the development of efficient technologies for renewable energy conversion and storage. Green hydrogen is widely regarded as a promising clean energy carrier because of its high gravimetric energy density and environmentally benign utilization. Among various hydrogen-production technologies, electrochemical water splitting (EWS) provides a renewable-energy-driven pathway by converting electricity into chemical energy through the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER). However, the efficiency of EWS is hindered by the sluggish kinetics and high overpotential of the OER due to its complex four-electron transfer process through the formation and transformation of oxygen-containing intermediates (*OH, *O, *OOH). Besides, the scaling relationship among the adsorption energies of these intermediates imposes a thermodynamic limitation in independent optimization. These thermodynamic and kinetic constraints stimulated growing interest in an additional degree of freedom for regulating OER performance: electron spin. This spin perspective is particularly relevant to the OER because of the fundamental spin-state difference between singlet reactants (H2O and OH–), and the triplet paramagnetic O2 product. Both existing theoretical and experimental research have shown that controlling the spin state of the electrocatalyst may influence oxygen formation and desorption pathways, thus reducing the energy loss during the reaction. To explore this concept, transition-metal oxide catalysts based on Fe, Co, and Ni will be synthesized and systematically characterized. Their electrocatalytic activity will be examined under applied external magnetic fields through integrated experimental measurements and computational modeling. Establishing the relationship between magnetic properties, spin states, and OER activity may provide new design principles for more efficient electrocatalysts and support the development of scalable green hydrogen production.
Supervisor: Mirabbos Khujamberdiev
