主题 : Challenges and Opportunities for Green Hydrogen Production from Water Electrolysis

报告人：Chuan Zhao

时间：2024年6月24日（周一）14：00-16：00

地点：霞光楼220

邀请人：李新昊 教授

个人简介

Prof Chuan Zhao is a Professor at the School of Chemistry at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and the Head of UNSW Nanoelectrochemistry Lab. Prof Zhao received his PhD with an excellence award from Northwest University, then completed postdoctoral research at University of Oldenburg and Monash University, before starting his independent career in UNSW in 2010. He is currently the Deputy Director and Theme Leader for hydrogen production in the ARC Training Centre for the Global Hydrogen Economy, the Deputy Research Director, Flagship Program Director and the Sydney Node Director in the ARC Centre of Excellence on Green Electrochemical Transformation of Carbon Dioxide, and the past Chair of the Electrochemistry Division Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI). Prof Zhao is a Highly Cited Researcher and has received numerous awards including recently the R.H. Stokes Medal, the most distinguished award for Australian electrochemists. He is the elected Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), Fellow of RACI (FRACI) and Fellow of Royal Society of New South Wales (FRSN). Prof Zhao is interested in discovering novel electrochemical methods and materials for applications in water splitting, hydrogen fuel cells, CO2 reduction, aqueous batteries, and sensors. He has published more than 300 high impact research papers, and holds 16 families of patent of which 10 have been commercialised. 

报告摘要

Hydrogen holds the promise as green energy carriers for global scale storage of renewable energy, e.g., solar and wind, enabling the continuous usage of these diffusive and intermittent energy sources when used together with fuel cells.  Water electrolyser is a cornerstone technology for the hydrogen economy, which requests highly efficient, low cost, and robust catalyst materials to reduce its current levels of energy consumption and cost. However, currently there is a gap between lab-scale research and industrial scale water electrolysis, effectuated by catalysts, cell design, and operation conditions.

This talk highlights the current challenges and opportunities for water electrolysis from a material perspective and showcases our efforts in developing electrocatalysts for oxygen evolution reactions (OER) and hydrogen evolution reactions (HER) in alkaline and acid electrolytes, as well as operando methodologies for understanding the catalytic processes and gas bubble behaviours. The commercialisation of some our work for water electrolyser industry also will be introduced to highlight the significance of material design from atomic to macroscopic to industrial scale.