Porous Materials for the 'Energy Revolution'

Sustainable energy supply and storage is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century, which the group of Stefan Kaskel, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at TU Dresden, also aims to tackle. For many years, they have been successfully researching nanostructured and porous carbon materials for the use in batteries, fuel cells, super capacitors and catalysis.

Now, the team is expecting support by a renowned international researcher. Prof. Qiang Xu, Director of the AIST-Kyoto University Chemical Energy Materials Open Innovation Laboratory (ChEM-OIL) and Humboldt Research Award Winner, will come and conduct research on nanostructured materials together with Stefan Kaskel. Furthermore, they will initiate new long-term collaborations. Stefan Kaskel himself nominated the renowned Japanese chemist for the Humboldt Research Award, which is granted exclusively to researchers whose fundamental discoveries, new theories and insights have had a significant influence on their own discipline and who are expected to continue to make groundbreaking achievements in the future.

Prof Xu is such a scientist with groundbreaking achievements in the fields of energy-related materials and catalysis. Xu obtained his PhD in Physical Chemistry from Osaka University in 1994. He joined the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in 1995 and initiated the collaboration between AIST and Kyoto University on chemical energy materials as the founding director of ChEM-OIL in 2017.

He is internationally recognised as a key figure in materials science and has an extensive list of publications and numerous awards. Xu's current research goal is the development and commercialisation of nanostructured materials, including materials based on metal organic frameworks (MOFs) and carbons, with high performance for hydrogen evolution catalysis and for electrical energy storage applications, both of which are important for the "Energiewende".

With the help of the Humboldt Research Award, Prof. Xu, in addition to TU Dresden, endeavours to initiate new long-term collaborations with several German groups, including the Leibniz Institute for Catalysis Rostock. Due to the corona pandemic, however, the stay planned for June 2020 will probably be postponed until 2021.

EurekAlert!, the online, global news service operated by AAAS, the science society: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-06/tud-pmf060920.php