Inventing new ways to produce energy and mitigate its byproducts

Chemistry plays a central role in the growing field of renewable and clean energy. As examples, we are interested in developing new ways to harness sunlight using new syntheses of carbon materials or to split water with the aid of theoretical insights; as well as investigating dense battery science and addressing the safe handling of radionuclides. These approaches prepare students with expertise in the efficient generation of energy from a wide range of sources, its storage, and its handling. Recent highlights associated with this theme are shown below.  See more faculty interested in this theme »

Faculty

Research

H2 Production from Reactions Between Water and Metal Centers in Non-Traditional Oxidation States

Professors Caroline Chick Jarrold and Krishnan Raghavachari are applying experimental and computational approaches to learn about the production of H2 from decomposition of water on transition metal oxide clusters in which the metal centers are in non-traditional...

Interfacing Functional Molecules with Electrodes

Professors Steve Tait and Amar Flood are collaborating on a new project aimed at ordering and interfacing electronically active molecules on surfaces — the figure shows a pattern where the periodicity and translational order are those of a crystal, a...

Renewable Ways to Use Carbon for Energy

Professor Liang-shi Li’s group has been developing renewable ways to use carbon for energy. Their approaches are based on nanometer-sized flakes of graphene, which are essentially single atomic layers of graphite (or sp2 -carbons). The size of the g...