quite low; you could not, for example, run a car using just a solar cell. Therefore, what we need to try and do is to find a way to store solar energy so that when the sun is not shining, we can still use it. Chemical fuels are a good place to start, because their energy intensity is very high, and so far hydrogen is the main chemical fuel that we have been working with.” To make hydrogen from water using electrolysis,
catalysts
are essential. If one does not use catalysts, too much energy will be lost and the inefficiency of the reaction makes the process unviable. Hu and his colleagues realised that, at present, the best catalysts for this reaction are made from materials such as platinum. With the ultimate goal of solar energy being the creation of cheap energy for the rapidly expanding global population, using precious metals is not only an expensive option but an impossible one. “We have been developing an alternative
and postdocs working in the laboratory. They are taught how to design and create the catalysts, and then are guided to analyse the performance of their creations and have discussions on whether their catalysts are working as well as they should, and if not, how they can improve them. “A lot of the time we are looking at what we call structure activity study, which helps our students to rationally understand what is going on,” explains Hu. “We also spend much of our
time on helping the
“Solar energy is for obvious reasons an
intermittent source of energy. You can
capture energy from the sun during the
day, but not by night”
students understand how they can improve the design of their catalysts if they are not working.” Despite all of these
different areas of focus, there are many more areas of
research lined up for
the near future. “In terms of our refined chemical synthesis work, we now
catalyst based on molybdenum sulphide, which is not only efficient and can be prepared from solution very simply, but is also a very readily available and abundant chemical,” says Hu. “We have a patent on this now, but we are still doing a lot of work on this project, which is funded by the European Union through a European Research Council (ERC) starting grant.” Much of the work done in these two projects is supported by the many students
want to start looking at iron-based catalysts,” says Hu. “Iron is non-toxic and is also very cheap, and so for industry, iron catalysts would be extremely useful. However, iron catalysts are currently not well understood, and so we want to work on improving this understanding.” “At present, our
fuel-chemistry project
deals with turning electricity into hydrogen. What we want to start doing is to collaborate with engineers and physical chemists so that we can look at the whole process of turning sunlight into hydrogen from start to finish. We also start to develop catalysts that could potentially turn CO2 into useful fuels through an artificial photosynthetic process.”
★
Project Duration and Timing: Ongoing since 2007
Project Funding: European Union; Swiss National Science Foundation; Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Main Contact:
Project Information AT A GLANCE
Project Title: SusCat: Developing catalysts made of earth abundant elements for synthesis and energy storage
Project Objective: Creating and understanding base- metal catalysts; application of such catalysts in fine chemical synthesis and in solar fuel production
Xile Hu Prof. Xile Hu received a B.S. degree from Peking University (2000) and a Ph.D. degree from the University of California, San Diego (2004). After a postdoctoral study at the California Institute of Technology, he joined the faculty of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2007.
Contact: Tel: + 41 (0) 21 693 9781 Email:
Xile.hu@
epfl.ch Web:
http://lsci.epfl.ch
www.projectsmagazine.eu.com
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