To limit global warming we need to harvest sustainable energy and be able to store it. Unfortunately present-day electro-chemical devices have very low efficiencies. In this project, you will study the molecular-scale properties of aqueous electro-chemical devices to make them more efficient.
The world is facing a tremendous challenge in limiting global warming resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. Over the last decades, a lot of progress has been made in the harvesting of sustainable energy by solar panels and wind turbines. However, to truly establish an energy-sustainable society, we also need to store sustainable energy in an efficient manner, i.e. by transferring the electricity produced by the sun or wind into high-energy chemical compounds like hydrogen or methanol via electrochemical process. This constitutes a very important challenge to solve: present electrochemical devices have very low efficiencies and can often not be scale...