That’s right! We’ve recently been awarded a grant from the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) for half a million euro, to research and overcome some of the major obstacles to large scale hydrogen production. In particular, we aim to design economically feasible catalysts that are both efficient and sustainable for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER).

This project will combine both homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis to develop novel hybrid catalysts with the advantages of both types of system. Of course, the amount of different catalytic candidates has increased drastically, meaning we will be employing several techniques such as density functional theory, the use scaling relations, and machine learning algorithms to speed up this process.

This grant also allows us to take on two more PhD students and a postdoctoral researcher to work on this exciting project! Feel free to get in touch if you are interested!