Photo(electro) catalytic solar fuel production

The ever-increasing demand for energy coupled with the need to reduce fossil fuel use is a major driver for the continuous research efforts to develop clean and sustainable energy systems. This is one of the reasons why photo(electro)catalysis has attracted a lot of attention in recent years for producing fuels by harvesting solar energy via above band gap excitation of semiconductor materials. As a result, significant progress has been made toward the construction of semiconductor-based photo(electro)catalysts. The state-of-the-art solar fuel production research performance is still lagging behind the > 10% efficiency requirements set by industrial expectations. This special issue will focus on reporting the recent breakthroughs and progress in solar fuel (such as H2, CO, CH4, and NH3) production by outstanding scientists in the field. These new results are believed to provide a solid starting point to stimulate the field and deliver novel strategies for designing even better photo(electro)catalysts for solar fuel generation.

Prof. Maarten B. J. Roeffaers graduated from the Centre for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis, KU Leuven (Belgium), in 2008 studying zeolite catalysis with fluorescence microscopy. After a postdoctoral stay (2009–2010) with Prof. Xie at Harvard University (United States) on the development and use of coherent Raman microscopy, he returned to KU Leuven. In 2010, he started his own research group (www.roeffaers-lab.org) focusing on the development of optical microscopy tools to study heterogeneous (photo)catalysis and optically active materials such as Ag-zeolites and metal halide perovskites.

Dr. Tao Zhang is a full professor and the head of the research group of Interface-functional Polymer Materials (iPFM) at Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received Bachelor and Master degrees at Sichuan University (China) in 2008 and 2011, respectively. Then he joined the Technische Universität Dresden (Germany) for PhD thesis and obtained PhD degree in Oct. 2015. After that, He moved to the Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed) for postdoc. In 2018 fall, under the award of cfaed INSPIRE Grant, He moved to the University of Cambridge as a visiting scientist. In Jan. 2020, he joined Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering as principal investigator (PI). His scientific interests include synthesis of new-type of 2D polymers and conducting polymers, 2D carbon-rich conjugated polymers for opto-electronics, new energy devices and technologies. He has published over 60 peer reviewed papers including Chem. Rev., Nat. Chem., Nat. Commun., J. Am. Chem. Soc., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., Adv. Mater., ACS Macro Lett., etc., with h-index = 33, >4400 citations. He is (young) editor board member for Chin. Chem. Lett. (Elsevier), Front. Chem. Sci. Eng. (Springer), Collagen and Leather (Springer), advisory board for Heliyon (Elsevier), review editor for Frontiers in Catalysis.

Jorge Gascon (Huesca, 1977) received his MSc. in Chemistry in 2002 and his PhD cum laude in Chemical Engineering in 2006, both at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). He was post-doc (2006 to 2009), Assistant Professor (2010 to 2012), Associate Professor (2012 to 2014) and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor (2014-2017) of Catalysis Engineering at TUDelft (NL). Since 2017 he is Professor and Director at the KAUST Catalysis Center. Research interests fall at the interphase of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, including the development and demonstration of new nano-structured materials and composites. Applications comprise membrane and adsorbent development, multifunctional catalysis, CO2 valorization, Fischer Tropsch Synthesis, Methanol to olefins and photo-(thermal) catalysis. He has co-authored over 300 publications in peer-reviewed journals that have attracted over 33000 citations (H index 94), several book chapters, 9 patents and has edited the book ‘Metal Organic Frameworks as Heterogeneous Catalysts'. During the last 5 years he has been a Clarivate Highly cited researcher.

Research Article, Review

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