M-Era.net project acronym: HetCat
Project duration: July 2023 - July 2026
Project coordinator – J. Kotomins
Partners:
- Jozef Stefan Institute (Ljubljana, Slovenia)
- Taiwan University
- ISSP UL (Jevgēnijs Kotomins)
Budget: 600 000 euro
ISSP UL part: 210 000 euro
Solar energy, reaching the earth in one day significantly exceeds the global annual energy needs. However, the present technologies are still not capable to efficiently exploit this huge, inexhaustible and free energy potential, that could help humanity to overcome the dependence from limited fossil resources and consequently solve many world problems related to pollution, global warming and geopolitical conflicts. Great scientific efforts are ongoing across different fields to develop sustainable technology for efficient solar energy capture and storage. Green conversion of solar energy into H2 is attracting great attention, since H2 is carbon-neutral, storable, transportable energy source as well as important chemical. Production of H2 through photocatalytic water splitting process is one of the appealing strategies, which nowadays does not enable the highest solar-to-hydrogen (STH) efficiency, nevertheless this process is the cheapest, simplest and the most appropriate for scaling up. All these have intensified the research for development of new and more efficient H2-evolution photocatalysts.
The main bottlenecks in achieving high STH efficiency through photocatalytic process are most commonly associated with rapid charge recombination, inefficient light harvesting and ineffective catalytic sites for driving complex multi-electron redox processes. In the HetCat project, we aimed to address these challenges by employing morphological, electronic and structural design-principles for engineering of optimized photocatalytic system based on two-dimensional (2D) nanostructures of metal titanates and niobates, which will be combined in 2D/2D epitaxial heterostructures and in 2D/2D heterostructures with g-C3N4. We are going to employ holistic approach and combine the latest knowledge in DFT calculations (LU CFI) , which will support and trigger the engineering of defined 2D morphologies and epitaxial 2D/2D heterostructures grown in Jozef Stefan Institute (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and tested in Taiwan University.