Research Projects

The project aims to explore the potential of direct methanol and ethanol as renewable liquid fuels for sustainable development. Methanol offers advantages such as easy transportation, handling, and high energy density, making it ideal for developing electrode materials for alcohol fuel cells. Pt-based anode catalysts have shown promise but face cost and CO poisoning issues, making Ni-based electrocatalysts more attractive. The project aims to design Ni-based catalysts with unique structures and lattice parameters that establish a favorable structural-activity relationship in both MOR and EOR. The primary challenge lies in creating Ni species in a low-valent state that can promote the six-electron MOR process at a low onset potential. Porous materials like zeolites can effectively mitigate CO poisoning in MOR or EOR. Zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs) will be employed to construct well-designed metal oxides for decorating the new Ni-based catalysts. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) will be used as hard and soft templating agents to synthesize porous nanostructures of Ni(OH)2 or NiO. The project will also incorporate carbon matrices, such as reduced graphene oxide (rGO) and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs), into the catalyst structure to improve the overall efficiency of electron transfer during electro-oxidation reactions. The synthesized catalysts will be combined with these carbon supports to achieve high current density and efficiency. The main objective is to design various Ni-based catalysts for MOR and EOR, utilizing zeolite-Y, ZIFs, and MOFs as templates and agents for directing shape and size.