Symposium U: Materials for Catalysis in Energy

2012 MRS Spring Meeting logo

Materials for Catalysis in Energy

Growing demand in energy and the need to reduce our society’s carbon footprint call for transformative ways to increase efficiency, sustainability, and diversity in energy production, conversion, and storage.  Novel materials will play a key role here by acting as catalysts and facilitating desirable chemical transformations.  It is becoming increasingly evident that bringing the materials science perspective into catalyst discovery can provide many opportunities in synthesis, characterization, and the use of novel catalysts in energy applications.  Control of morphology, shape, interface, and size in synthesis can help establish a structure-activity relationship essential to the understanding of a catalyst’s function.  Materials with well-defined structures allow one to precisely introduce and tune the surface functionality to achieve high selectivity.  To make a sizable contribution to the society’s energy issue, electrocatalysts have to move away pure platinum towards cheaper alternatives.  Materials strategies to reduce the cost by employing more abundant elements are highly preferable.  Artificial photosynthesis of fuels by water splitting and CO2 reduction via photocatalytic materials is the holy grail of clean energy, but the challenge is to achieve high enough solar-energy conversion efficiency.  Advances in atomic-level characterization and theoretical/computational methods could also speed up our discovery of novel materials for use as catalysts in energy applications.

This symposium is aimed at bringing together researchers in materials science, chemical synthesis, heterogeneous catalysis, electrocatalysis, and photocatalysis to highlight recent progress and discuss challenges and opportunities in the materials aspect of catalysis research for energy applications.

Topics addressed in this symposium will include (but will not be limited to):

  • Sunlight to fuels via photocatalytic materials
  • Materials for catalytic production of fuels and chemicals
  • Metals, alloys, and nonprecious-metal materials for electrocatalysis
  • Synthesis in control of morphology, size, shape, interface, and pore structure
  • Catalysis by materials with well-defined structures
  • Characterization of materials for catalysis in energy
  • Theory and modeling of materials for catalysis in energy

A tutorial complementing this symposium is tentatively planned.  Further information will be included in the MRS Program that will be
available online in January.

Invited speakers include:

Emily Carter (Princeton Univ.), Sheng Dai (Oak Ridge National Lab), Kazunari Domen (Univ. of Tokyo, Japan), Heinz Frei (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab), Craig Grimes (Photonic Fuels LLC), Joseph Hupp (Northwestern Univ.), Graham Hutchings (Cardiff Univ., United Kingdom), Wenbin Lin (Univ. of North Carolina), Jun Liu (Pacific Northwest National Lab), Chung-Yuan Mou (National Taiwan Univ., Taiwan), Jens Nørskov(Stanford Univ.), Robert Schlögl (Fritz-Haber-Inst. der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Germany), Vojislav Stamenkovic (Argonne National Lab), Steven Suib (Univ. of Connecticut), Younan Xia (Washington Univ., St. Louis), Peidong Yang (Univ. of California, Berkeley).

Symposium Organizers

De-en Jiang
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Chemical Sciences Division
MS 6201, P. O. Box 2008
Oak Ridge, TN 37831
Tel 865-574-5199, Fax 865-576-5235
jiangd@ornl.gov  

Harold H. Kung
Northwestern University
Dept. of Chemical and Biological Engineering
2145 Sheridan Rd.
Evanston, IL 60208-3120
Tel 847-491-7492, Fax 847-491-3728
hkung@northwestern.edu 

Rongchao Jin
Carnegie Mellon University
Dept. of Chemistry
4400 Fifth Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Tel 412-268-9448, Fax 412-268-1061
rongchao@andrew.cmu.edu 

Robert M. Rioux
The Pennsylvania State University
Dept. of Chemical Engineering
158 Fenske Laboratory
University Park, PA 16802-4400
Tel 814-867-2503, Fax 814-865-7846
rioux@engr.psu.edu 

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