Colloquium - 18 December 2023 – Prof. Chuan Zhao, The University of New South Wales

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

Time: 2023-12-18 11:00 - 12:30

Venue: Institute for Energy Research, 1517 (315-312-016)

Organizer: Institute for Energy Research

Abstract: 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 in catalyst and electrolyser developments and 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 of our work for water electrolyser industry also will be introduced to highlight the significance of material design from atomic to macroscopic to industrial scale.