MSE Seminar: “Single Metal Site Catalysts for Sustainable and Clean Hydrogen Energy”
December 5 at 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Fossil fuels have been overwhelmingly used in many industry sectors in past decades, causing significant CO2 and other pollutant emissions, low efficiency, and nonsustainability. Clean and efficient energy storage and conversion via electrochemical reactions associated with hydrogen, oxygen, and water have attracted substantial attention for energy and environmental sustainability. Among compelling energy technologies, hydrogen proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are a promising zero-emission power source for transportation to mitigate environmental pollution and reduce fossil-fuel dependence. Meanwhile, water electrolyzers have been clearly identified as the sustainable pathway to produce cheap green hydrogen efficiently using renewable electricity. However, current materials, including catalysts, membranes, and ionomers, cannot meet the challenging targets of high-efficiency, low-cost, and long-term durability of hydrogen fuel cells and water electrolyzers. Developing high-performance catalysts from earth-abundant elements to replace current precious metals is crucial for making these hydrogen technologies viable for large-scale clean energy applications. U.S. DOE has continuously supported his research group in the past decade, aiming to address materials issues by designing and scaling up innovative and highly efficient catalysts and electrodes. This talk discusses recent understanding, progress, achievement, and perspective on developing low-cost and high-performance catalysts based on newly emerging atomically dispersed metal-nitrogen-carbon materials for sustainable and clean hydrogen technologies.
Gang Wu
Professor, Department of Energy, Environmental, & Chemical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis,
Gang Wu is a professor of chemical engineering with expertise in electrochemical science and engineering. He completed all his degrees, including Ph.D., at the Harbin Institute of Technology in 2004. After carrying out extensive postdoctoral training at Tsinghua University, the University of South Carolina, and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), he became a staff scientist at LANL in 2010. Then, he joined SUNY-Buffalo as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2014 and was quickly promoted to a tenured associate professor in 2018 and a full professor in 2020.
After one decade of service at SUNY-Buffalo, he joined Washington University in St. Louis in 2024. His current research focuses on advanced electrocatalysis and catalysis for hydrogen and carbon-neutral electrochemical energy technologies, such as polymer electrolyte fuel cells, water electrolysis, CO2 reduction, electrosynthesis, and carbon-free nitrogen electrochemistry. He is also interested in developing clean energy-related heterogeneous catalysis, including efficient ammonia synthesis and cracking, to overcome the grand challenges of hydrogen storage and transportation. Dr. Wu is a leading scientist in exploring single-metal-site catalysts for sustainable electrocatalysis, evidenced by his over 340 papers in prestigious journals and citations of around 57,000 times with an H-index of 130 (Google Scholar by October 2024). Dr. Wu was continuously acknowledged by Clarivate Analytics as one of the Highly Cited Researchers since 2018. He serves as an Associate Editor for a few journals, including the Journal of the Electrochemical Society (JES), the Electrochemical Society’s flagship journal. He recently received the Energy Technology Division Research Award from the Electrochemical Society (ECS).