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Human civilization presently face severe crisis in energy sector. To tackle such a situation, the scientific
community have strongly responded with a (photo)electrochemical device that possesses high
potential to commercially produce chemicals/fuels/energy. These device essentially consists of a
(photo)anode where water split to O2 and cathode where H2O or CO2 reduced to H2 or fuels like
methanol, ethanol etc, as shown in Figure 1. This mimics the natural photosynthesis process, thus
aptly named as artificial photosynthetic device (APS). My laboratory at Indian Institute of Engineering
Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur proposes to fabricate such device from scratch, i.e. developing
materials followed by electrode fabrication, device
engineering and its testing. For material fabrication
perspective, I will discuss the development of
bifunctional catalytic electrode through an
innovative “city waste water” technique, which
matches the industrial production standards, easy
to make and low cost. The bifunctional electrodes
prepared through such technique show interesting
water splitting property to H2 fuel. They exhibited
exceptional electrocatalytic activity as well as
stability than the electrodes made with the
industrially scalable techniques, for instance
electrodeposition. On the front of developing such
a device, we 3D-printed a memebrane-less
electrolyzer which collects H2 with as high purity as 85-90%. For direct capturing of sunlight, we
further developed photoanode from a novel galvanic deposition. We characterized the galvanic
deposition process through various in-situ electrochemical techniques including quartz crystal
microbalance as well as other physicochemical techniques. These photoanode exhibited comparable
photocatalytic properties to the electrode that was developed through other energy expensive
process such as electrodeposition. Last but not least, I will discuss about activity on commercializing
our advanced and state-of-the-art electrodes through a startup, called Eliteck Ind. Pvt. Ltd. |