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: Prof. Yogendra Kumar Mishra