UQ Researchers Develop Novel Renewable Energy Materials
A new chemical method guides micrometer-sized TiO 2 crystals to expose a large fraction of reactive (001) facets versus nonreactive (101) facets.
Credit: Chenghua Sun/Australian Inst. Bioengineering & Nanotechnology
Credit: Chenghua Sun/Australian Inst. Bioengineering & Nanotechnology
Professor Lu, who was recently awarded a second prestigious Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship, said it wasn't just renewable energy where this research could be applied.
These crystals are also fantastic for purifying air and water, he said.
The same principle for such materials to convert sunlight to electricity is also working to break down pollutants in water and air.
One could paint these crystals onto a window or a wall to purify the air in a room.
The potential of applications of this technology in water purification and recycling are huge.
Professor Lu said it would be about five years for the water and air pollution applications to be commercially available, and about 5 to 10 years for the solar energy conversion using such crystals.
He said the breakthrough technology was a great example of cross-discipline collaborations with work by Professor Sean Smith's Computational Molecular Science group at AIBN, who conducted key computational studies and helped the experimentalist researchers to focus on specific surface modification elements for control of the crystal morphology.
First-principle computational chemistry is a powerful tool in aiding the design and synthetic realisation of novel nanomaterials, and this work is a beautiful example of the synergy, Professor Smith said.
Professor Lu said the work was also the result of a very fruitful and long-term international collaboration with Professor Huiming Cheng's group from the Chinese Academy of Sciences , a world-class institution with which UQ has many productive research collaborations.
The research, which was produced with colleagues Huagui Yang, Chenghua Sun, Shizhang Qiao, Gang Liu, Jin Zou, has been published in the latest edition of scientific journal Nature (doi:10.1038/nature06964).
Source: University of Queensland /...
