conferences

Sustainable electrocatalysts for ethanol oxidation

~ moleculardreams ~ Leave a comment

The replacement of fossil fuel with sustainable alternatives free from environmental footprint is one of the most important challenges to combat climate change and meet the ever increasing energy demand of our planet. The sustainable production of hydrogen fuel through biomass-derived ethanol in Direct Ethanol Fuel Cells is a promising route, but the high costs and short lifecycle of platinum – which is still the preferred catalyst – are a serious problem. So, the quest to valid yet convenient substitutes to platinum is an open and challenging task.

We (actually, my experimental colleagues) prepared an electrocatalysts for Ethanol Oxidation Reaction based on a low-cost and abundant metal oxide, namely manganese oxide. The fabrication strategy involves the growth of manganese oxide nanostructures on nickel foam scaffolds via plasma-assisted chemical vapor deposition and the functionalization with gold nanoparticles in low amount – as sketched in the picture below. That’s the magic of molecule-to-nanomaterials conversion!

The synthesized nanostructures have large surface area and show great performances as electrocatalysts in the ethanol oxidation reaction, comparing favourably with the best oxide-based catalysts known to date. We found that a very tiny amount of gold nanoparticles is sufficient to boost the catalytic activity of manganese oxide.

Our findings not only afford a convenient route for sustainable electrocatalysts, but also explain why our catalyst is so efficient. Theoretical modeling (#compchem) showed that gold nanoparticles activate the oxide surface toward the ethanol oxidation reaction. In other words, ethanol undergoes both partial oxidation and deprotonation immediately upon adsorption on the catalyst. Hence, our catalyst optimally prepares ethanol to the electrochemical oxidation process.

This knowledge, combined with the proposed fabrication route, may guide the development of electrocatalysts based on earth-abundant metal-oxides for ethanol valorization in Direct Ethanol Fuel Cells and for (photo)electrochemical water splitting.

Personally, I enjoyed very much this work, because metal-metal oxides interfaces are particularly challenging to deal with by #compchem. Also, I like very much to interact with my experimental colleagues and friends: they always have interesting problems, and collaborating together to find a solution is often the best part of the work. Very happy that computational modeling may help to understand the complex behaviour of these intriguing materials!

We presented this work at the fabulous #RSCPoster conference 2021. Here’s a pdf copy of our poster.

This work was published in J. Mater. Chem. A, 2020,8, 16902. A free author version is available on Figshare

RSC Twitter conference 2018

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The Twitter Poster Conference is an annual event organized by the Royal Society of Chemistry, which consists of sharing chemical research using tweets. You may take part either by tweeting an image of your poster or by commenting on other poster (doing both is better, in my view). As in a traditional conference, you see great research, are asked interesting questions, meet old friends, and come in contact with new colleagues or potential collaborators. Only, at the twitter conference this happens 24 hours non-stop  on global scale; so, it’s a good idea to get there prepared!

I enjoyed so much my 2017 participation that I couldn’t miss the 2018 edition.  Of course, it was awesome, and I am grateful to the organizers, the sessions’ chairs, and all participants, particularly those with whom I interacted.  Indeed, I have learnt new stuff, seen exciting science, been inspired, without moving from my office and paying any conference fees. Really cannot ask for more. Many thanks to all of you!

Tweeting posters is not trivial. For optimal readability,  you should keep into account, for example,  that mobile phones have small screens, and that Twitter images are resized and cropped down – so, it would be better to prepare the poster in landscape format. These and other useful tips can be found in this excellent post. I came across it when the event was over, but it would surely be useful in the future.

Below you can find my poster, illustrating the fruitful collaboration between calculations and diffraction experiments at high-pressure conditions.

Besides water and ethanol in ferrierite (discussed in this post), the poster shows our new work on a host-guest compound of zeolite L and fluorenone dye under high pressure. These host-guest materials have excellent optical properties, useful for many applications, from solar cells to sensing in medical technology. Knowing their structure and working principles could help improve their performances – that’s why we try so hard to understand dye-zeolite composites at molecular level.

Basically fluorenone inside the channels of zeolite L forms a molecular ladder, which is very stable at room conditions because the carbonyl groups of the dye interact very strongly with the potassium cations of the zeolite.

Is this peculiar structure also stable under GPa pressures?

According to experiments and simulations, the answer is apparently yes!  Our composite  maintains its structure, and the interactions between the dye and the zeolite cations become stronger. The exceptional resilience of this material to compression highlights its outstanding mechanical properties. These are important to extend the application of dye-zeolite composites beyond room-pressure conditions.

More about this research can be found in this recently published paper (“Unravelling the High-Pressure Behaviour of Dye-Zeolite L Hybrid Materials”) – which is open access. The high-resolution poster and the green open access version of the ferrierite paper can be downloaded at figshare.

 

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RSC Twitter poster session 2017

~ moleculardreams ~ 1 Comment

On March 20th, i took part to the RSC Twitter Poster Conference 2017, an online event organized by The Royal Society of Chemistry to favour new contacts and exchanges among researchers in chemical sciences. The event was a big success.

To those of you that might wonder what a twitter poster session is, here’s an excerpt from The Analytical Scientist:

How do Twitter poster sessions work?
Participants tweet an image of their poster with the title and hashtags #RSCPoster and the area (e.g. #RSCAnal) at any point throughout a 24-hour period. This means that people anywhere in the world can join in.  

It’s a fully global event open to every chemist on twitter. No conference fees: by following the hashtag #RSCPoster, anyone could attend and submit their poster.

What a nice surprise when nice images of posters started appearing in the feed on that Monday morning. Awesome idea – i thought,  tweeting my contribution a few seconds later.

To be honest, the poster was not prepared for the occasion – I simply recycled a poster presented at a traditional conference, and I shared it just to see what would happen.  It was great. Not only people were tweeting their images, they were also commenting on the posters, just like in a standard conference but within 140 characters.  The participants were discussing technical aspects of the results or methodology, asking more general questions on the featured research, and all of this worked wonderfully.   It was exciting: every few seconds, a new contribution was added to the feed, containing interesting and well presented science.

As in normal conferences, this wasn’t just a chance to present your own project, but also a fantastic opportunity to look at what the researchers out there were doing, and to learn a lot from it. New ideas were inspired by work in apparently unrelated research areas. Beside science, it was also a very useful experience in communicating research to a heterogeneous audience using few, carefully selected words.  Yet another demonstration of how twitter can be useful to scientists!

I regret that i wasn’t able to look at all the posters during the session – they were definitely too many.  Fortunately, even if the conference is over, the posters are still hanging on the virtual wall at the RSC Tumblir site, so that in the case you missed the event, you might still catch up with the interesting science. I’d strongly recommend to give a look at them: they’re awesome!

Some lucky participants got the coolest thing you could ever imagine: a cartoon abstact of their poster – like this one:

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So I’m very grateful to @MCeeP (ErrantScience.com) for making my day with this, and for the incredible tour-de-force of drawing the cartoons! I much enjoyed to see all of them: not only they were funny, but also further engaged the participants, stimulating curiosity and new conversations. These brilliant poster abstracts really made the conference unique.

This is crazy but …what if cartoon abstracts were introduced in traditional conferences as well?  To get a feeling, just check out the complete gallery of these cool cartoons of posters at ErrantScience.

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Finally, many thanks to the RSC, the organizers, and the participants for such a great experience. A superb way to promote chemical research. I’m glad to have been some little part of it, and looking forward for the next year event.

Just for the records, here’s my humble contribution to #RSCposter.  For those interested, what featured in the poster is briefly explained here (left side) and blogged here (right side).