Research
MOTIVATION
Humanity’s demand for fuels and chemicals is rapidly increasing, driven by a growing population and global demands for an improved quality of life. This demand must be rationalised against our need to mitigate the effect of humanity on the environment, in particular our need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions, reaching net zero by 2050 to mitigate the effects on climate change. Electrochemical technologies are ideally suited to address this challenge, with electrochemical CO2 reduction being well established for the conversion of CO2 into simple fuel molecules such as CO using renewable energy. However, CO2 must be captured and concentrated for it's utilisation as common sources are at reduced concentrations that can hurt the overall efficiency of these systems.
OUR APPROACH
We use a holistic approach, understanding the system across a range of length scales, from the molecular scale(Å)to the device scale (cm) to develop new devices to make platform chemicals beyond simple fuel molecules from captured CO2 . This combines multiple experimental techniques together with multiphysics modelling to gain a more complete understanding of device operation. This is combined with rapid prototyping approaches to optimise device performance towards a range of challenging, high value chemicals.
Holistic approach to device development
Our RESEARCH
We aim to apply our holistic approach to develop new ways of making platforms sustainably from waste materials, including captured CO2, biomass and wastewater. To achieve this our research addresses a diverse range of fundamental science questions in the field of electrocatalysis and applies this knowledge to enable step changes in the production of valuable chemicals from waste.