CO2 Conversion to Chemicals & Materials: from Fundamental Principles to Catalyst Design

The Queen Mary University of London and China Scholarship Council (CSC) have created a scholarship program to enable talented Chinese students to undertake a PhD at Queen Mary. The scholarships build on Queen Mary's existing relationship with China and links with Chinese research institutions and Universities. Queen Mary has the highest number of CSC scholars of all UK universities. Queen Mary is also one of the UK’s leading research-focused higher education institutions, member of the elite Russell Group of UK universities, and ranked 9^th in the UK in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework.

There are several potential PhD projects in the field of carbon dioxide (CO₂) conversion under the supervision of Dr Devis Di Tommaso. The student will be part of the School of Physics and Chemical Sciences and the newly formed “Centre for CO2 Conversion” led by Dr Di Tommaso, a doctoral training programme between Chemistry, Materials Science, and Computer Science.

Project description: The rising level of CO₂ in Earth’s atmosphere caused by the excessive emission from fossil fuels is the cause of global warming. One of the most attractive solutions is the conversion of CO₂ into added-value chemicals and materials. The PhD student in this project will develop and apply state-of-the-art computational and experimental methods to elucidate the elementary steps controlling: the electrocatalytic reduction of CO₂ to chemicals (e.g., carbon monoxide, formic acid, ethylene, ethanol); the CO₂ mineralization into solidified carbonate-based materials (e.g., MgCO₃).

Current active projects in Dr Di Tommaso’s group in the area of CO₂ conversion are listed below. They include collaborations with industries (Johnson Matthey, RISE, Cambridge Carbon Capture), governmental organizations (National Physics Laboratory, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) and other leading academic institutions (UCL, Singapore, Tohoku, Utrecht, Granada, Oviedo, Grenoble).

• Tunable metal-alloy-based catalysts for the electrocatalytic conversion of CO₂
• Tracking of CO₂ mineralization using neutron scattering and atomistic simulations
• Metalloporphyrin-based catalyst design towards CO₂ reduction
• Machine Learning models for CO₂ reduction electrocatalysts

Training & Development: The studentships are multi-disciplinary and will involve a combination of computational and experimental techniques. Computer simulations: quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, machine learning, scientific programming. Materials synthesis & characterization: nanostructured functional materials, processing into electrodes, incorporation into devices and testing of their structural and catalytic properties for CO₂ conversion, neutron scattering. As such, the PhD project will provide opportunities for training in a wide range of contemporary computational and material chemistry techniques and will equip the successful applicants with a highly desirable portfolio of scientific skills and associated transferable skills