News & Events

SEAFUEL project, co-financed by the 2014-2020 INTERREG Atlantic Area programme,  will have a stand in the first edition of the “Loving Galway” sustainability festival that will take place from the 20th to the 30th of September 2018, in celebration of the ‘Green and Blue’ spaces breathing life into Galway City. The aim of the SEAFUEL project is to demonstrate the feasibility to power local transportation using hydrogen produced by renewable energies and seawater, as an alternative fuel in remote Atlantic regions.  Pau Farràs, SEAFUEL’s project coordinator, will participate in the event with an information stand during two of the activities organized in the festival. These activities will take place on Sunday 23rd of September “Loving Galway – Ideas for a Beautiful Planet”, and on Sunday 30th, “Family fun day – Loving Galway Oyster Festival”. The festival is a unique collaboration between Galway City Council, Galway City Community Network, NUI Galway, Galway Mayo Institute of Technology, LAWCO, Galway Environmental Network, Youth Work Ireland Galway, Green-Schools, Galway Waterways, and community and environmental groups across the city. The festival builds on decades of activity by the City’s environmental community and is a legacy of Galway’s European Green Leaf designation in 2017.

Photocatalytic water splitting constitutes one major goal that addresses both the fundamental science and practical applications of renewable energy production. The Oxygen Evolving Complex (OEC) is the native enzyme that catalyzes the oxidation of water in natural photosynthesis to release oxygen. The creation of biomimetic systems to reproduce the basic chemistry of this process gives us more insight into better understanding this crucial natural reaction which is responsible of the atmospheric oxygen that we breathe. On the other hand, the growing world energy demand, along with the need for control of gas emissions, explains the current relevance of the conversion of solar energy to hydrogen by means of water splitting process. Decomposing water is the more direct way to produce hydrogen, which can be stored and utilized as a transportable fuel or converted into energy-rich organic molecules, to cope with the intermittent character of the solar radiation. This Special Issue aims to cover recent progress and developments in fabricating stable and highly active catalysts for photochemical water oxidation. Moreover, the research for understanding the fine details of natural photosynthesis, as well as the advances in the area of solar-powered fuel generation, should be important subjects for this Special Issue. Prof. Dr. Marcelino Maneiro Dr. Pau Farràs Costa  Guest Editors Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2018   Links:  http://www.mdpi.com/journal/catalysts/special_issues/photocatalytic_water_splitting

The 5th edition of the UK SFN was hosted at Newcastle University on the 26/27th January 2017. The meeting was organised in two days in which the first day PhD students and early career postdocs presented their work by oral, flash and poster presentations. Overall, 60 people attended the event with an excellent quality of the research presented covering a broad range of topics within solar fuels. The attendees saw research going from engineering and modelling of water-splitting reactors, new porous materials for light harvesting applications, to advanced spectroscopic techniques for molecules and materials characterization and computational tools in polymer photocatalysis.  The main symposium on the 27th hosted more than 90 people coming from universities across the UK and attended a very compressed programme with the following invited speakers. Prof Graetzel at EPFL gave the Centenary Prize Lecture and received the medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry for “his pioneering contributions in molecular photovoltaics and mesoscopic solar cells”. Dr Symes (University of Glasgow), Dr Haussener (EPFL) and Dr Zwijnenburg (University College London) gave their talks on electrochemical tools for water splitting, multi-scale guidelines for photoelectrochemical reactors and the development of polymeric photocatalysts using a combined computational and experimental approach. At the end, Prof Devens (Arizona State University) whom his expenses were funded by the ESED Division, gave a great talk summarising the contributions of Prof Anthony Harriman (Newcastle University) to the field of Artificial Photosynthesis in a very special session that concluded with the presentation of a glass trophy.  The symposium was also sponsored by Energy&Environmental Science and Sustainable Energy&Fuels that awarded prizes to the best oral and poster presentations to Dr Moritz Kuehnel (Cambridge University) and Yvonne Choo (Newcastle University), respectively. In addition, Nature Energy, Sigma-Aldrich Merck and Alvatek also supported the organisation of the meeting and representatives of each attended the symposium. Overall, the event was a success with a high participation and impressive quality of research and, most important, it was clear that solar fuels has an excellent cohort of young scientists that will be able to tackle the problem in new and imaginative ways. 

Pau and co-workers at Newcastle University are organising the 5th SFN Symposium on the 27th January 2017. More information can be found here.

The ChemLight group is growing! Sean Hennessey will join the lab as a MSc student working on photoactive porous frameworks.Neville Murphy and Lorcan Coyle have started their 4th year research project with Pau. Good luck!

The ChemLight Group has launched its website!