Research

The increasingly serious energy crisis and environmental pollution by the overuse of traditional fossil fuel, such as coal, petroleum, natural gas, etc., pose grave challenges to human society. The development of next-generation environmentally friendly and powerful clean energy systems becomes a dominant target for the modern world. Keeping this in mind, my future key research interests are aimed to tackle one of the greatest challenges in catalysis science – Identifying and developing unconventional functional heterogeneous catalysts for sustainable energy applications

We are actively involved in designing low-temperature synthesis of novel materials and their interfaces at the atomic and molecular level to provide numerous opportunities in heterogeneous catalysis for sustainable chemical energy conversion and other energy-saving areas. Such functional materials are applied for photo(electro)catalytic reactions of water splitting (O2 and H2 evolution as well as paired oxygenation and hydrogenation) devices, fuel cell (O2 reduction), and CO2 reduction technology, which have been regarded as promising routes to address future energy challenges. Our interests are also extended to the development of photo(electro)catalytic reactions in aqueous/non-aqueous environments inspired to enable the oxidation and reduction of challenging organic substrates wherein, we aim to re-activate functional compounds, which are key building blocks for various chemical transformations. Moreover, we have an enormous interest in the advancement of earth-abundant and non-toxic photocatalysts comprising of clusters of transition metals that are chemically stable to promotes complete decomposition of soluble water contaminants into non-toxic molecules either in solution or as liberated gas using visible (sun) light.

In each catalytic reaction, the emphasis will be given to uncover high-performance catalysts that can surpass the efficiencies of state-of-the-art industrial catalysts, and based on the results; we design lab-scale and large-scale devices, which can operate with low energy consumption. In addition to the performance of the catalysts, special importance is given to the surface and bulk structure of the catalyst, nature of the active sites, structure-activity relation, and mechanistic insights using advanced operando and in-situ spectroscopy as well as ex-situ methods. The electrode surface/interface, bandgap engineering, method development, and fine-tuning of the electronic as well as structural properties of the materials are also one of the crucial factors and are e studied to enhance the catalytic efficiencies. Apart from research, the process of technology transfer from universities, as inventors of technologies, are established to create an opportunity for both universities and industry to jointly build new technologies.