€1.5 Million for Sustainable Hydrogen Production Using Nanoconfined Water
Electrochemical water splitting powered by renewable electricity is a promising pathway to sustainable hydrogen production, but its efficiency and scalability remain limited by costly catalysts and slow reaction kinetics. With €1.5 million in funding from the Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung for five years, Dr. Yongkang Wang and his team will pursue a new approach by visualizing and controlling water at the molecular level, using nanoscale confinement to shape its structure and dynamics at catalytic interfaces. By tuning interfacial water, the project aims to accelerate proton transport and water-splitting reactions, laying the foundation for more efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable hydrogen production.
Electrochemical water splitting powered by renewable electricity offers a promising pathway to sustainable hydrogen production for climate-neutral energy systems. However, current technologies often rely on expensive precious-metal catalysts, limiting their potential for large-scale deployment. Earth-abundant catalysts provide a more sustainable alternative, but their catalytic activity is often constrained by slow reaction kinetics. A largely unexplored strategy for overcoming this challenge is to understand and deliberately control interfacial water at the molecular level, as its structure and dynamics play a critical role in determining electrocatalytic activity.
With five-year funding of €1.5 million from the CZS Nexus Program of the Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung (corresponding to €1.8 million including overhead), Dr. Yongkang Wang and his team will pursue a new approach to water splitting in Prof. Mischa Bonn’s department at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research by selectively shaping interfacial water through nanoscale confinement and precise control over its molecular organization.. This approach will enable the direct visualization and regulation of water structure, proton transport, and interfacial reactivity, opening new avenues for accelerating water-splitting reactions. Ultimately, the project aims to establish molecular design principles for developing more efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable approaches to hydrogen production.
The CZS Nexus Program supports interdisciplinary research that addresses major challenges at the interface of fundamental science and future technologies. The funding enables researchers to establish their own interdisciplinary research groups, providing them with the resources and independence to pursue innovative research while advancing their academic careers.
