LABORATORY
RESEARCHES
Catalysis in Green Energy & Chemical Conversions
Catalysis play critical roles in the energy, chemical, and environmental technology areas. We conduct studies on the design, synthesis, and characterization of various catalysts with their uses in the green energy & chemicals conversion such as in hydrogen production, electrochemical energy storage, and environmentally significant chemical conversions.
Catalytic materials, reaction kinetics and mechanisms are investigated applying various analysis techniques that includes volumetric and temperature programmed methods, X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, FT-IR, UV-Vis, Raman spectroscopy, electron microscopy, mass spectrometry, and gas chromatography, etc.
Electrochemical Energy Storage
The efficient storage of intermittent solar and wind power at scale is a critical challenge for the sustainable deployment of the renewable energy into the current energy infrastructure. We study electrochemical energy storage based on the redox reactions of liquid electrolytes in flow cell, which is called redox flow battery (RFB). Our current research is focused on the development of high performance electrodes, kinetics and mechanisms of the electrocatalytic reactions on the functionalized carbon electrodes, and the complex phenomena taking place in the RFBs.
Gas Separation Membranes / Membrane Reactor
Synthesis of porous materials of size controlled pore structures and their applications in selective gas/chemical separation are important and efficient emerging technology. We study inorganic and organic-inorganic hybrid membranes for applications in highly efficient selective gas separation as well as catalytic membrane reactors which can overcome the theoretical limits of the conventional chemical reaction processes.
We synthesize inorganic and organic-inorganic-hybrid membranes by various novel approaches. The properties of membranes are typically investigated by permeability-selectivity measurements and various characterization techniques such as electron microscopy, AFM, XRD, XPS etc.
