Research Projects

Human development in industry has been linked to fossil fuel combustion and greenhouse gas release, leading to increased energy demand and environmental pollution. Hydrogen energy is recognized as a potential alternative for water electrolysis to produce cost-effective clean energy, a sustainable strategy due to its abundance of resources, water production, and net-zero carbon emissions. In the future, hydrogen will become an important energy carrier, used as fuel for aircraft, heat homes, and offices. Electrocatalytic water splitting requires better electrocatalysts for HER/OER and other electrocatalytic reactions. MOFs with well-defined tunable pores, high specific surface area, and pore volume can be used as a platform for designing SACs with highly disseminated active metal sites. MOF-derived SACs can enhance metal catalyst loading and stability, making them useful in electrochemical energy translation and other electrocatalytic transformation reactions. SACs as heterogeneous catalysts have potential for their distinctive reactivity and enrich knowledge of molecular processes on the surface of active catalysts. They provide a pathway for catalytic applications such as CO oxidation, CO2 reduction, NH3 production, and OER/HER. The objective of this study is to electrochemically synthesize MOF precursors and use them for green hydrogen production. Challenges include the small size of pores in bulk MOFs, metal active sites in highly dispersed materials, and some MOFs being unstable during water splitting. SACs have the potential to surpass nanoparticles' catalytic activities in terms of activity, stability, and selectivity towards various electrocatalytic reactions. Single atom support offers an inimitable prospect for optimizing catalytic active sites for better stability, contributing to various applications in large-scale industrial reactions.