New Magnetic Core-Metal Oxide Shell Nanoparticles for Photocatalytic Water-Splitting

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During this DPhil project, research will focus on the design of novel technologies that use sunlight and water to produce hydrogen fuel. This project falls within the ESPRC Energy research area.The extreme weather caused by global warming is already creating humanitarian crisis. Due to severe droughts, people in Niger are fighting to stop their land turning into an inhospitable desert; Madagascar has seen four major storms in just one month (February 2022) that have "wrecked the island nation"; warming of the oceans threatens all its inhabitants and consequently, the lives of 3 billion people that depend on the food from the ocean and its coasts. As is commonly known, a major cause of global warming is rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere. CO2 is a greenhouse gas which traps heat, preventing its escape from Earth into space. CO2 emissions released from burning of fossils fuels, such as petrol, diesel, and coal, are significantly contributing to the rising atmospheric levels. This highlights why there is a great need for green alternatives to fossil fuels. Hydrogen (H2) is a realistic alternative green fuel. The emissions of H2 fuel are very clean and carbon-free; when burnt, H2 reacts with oxygen to produce only water. Further, gram for gram, significantly more energy is released when burning H2 compared to any fossil fuel.Before H2 can replace fossil fuels, a few technological challenges need overcoming. One of these challenges is producing H2 in a carbon-free and sustainable way. A promising solution, known as solar-catalytic water-splitting (SCWS), uses specifically designed technology to generate H2 from sunlight and water. This technology is incredibly sustainable. It uses two of the most abundant resources available to mankind - the sun and the sea. Due to low H2-generation efficiencies, SCWS technology is not currently commercially-viable. When SCWS systems absorb sunlight, they convert the solar energy into useful reaction energy and much-less-useful heat energy. The reaction energy converts water to H2. Current SCWS technologies have low efficiencies because they convert too much of the sunlight into heat energy and not enough into reaction energy.The research in this project will focus on designing new, more efficient SCWS technology that can use sunlight more effectively by converting a higher proportion of the absorbed solar energy into useful reaction energy for H2 generation. The approach of this research is to use known advantageous design features of various current SCWS systems and combine them into one highly efficient SCWS system. New advantageous features may also be discovered in this process. The main challenge will be figuring out how to make the new systems as this chemistry can be tricky and unpredictable. Through contributions from this research and from research by other scientists in the field, hopefully one day, SCWS technology will be used to sustainably generate H2 fuel anywhere that water and sunlight are available.