Description
Our group investigates, establishes and assesses new processes, mechanisms and systems for storing energy, as well as develop high performance catalysts to enhance the involved energy conversion processes. Likewise, we investigate new methods in harvesting and energy storage for fully autonomous systems.
We cover a diverse range of multidisciplinary activities, including:
- The physics and chemistry of materials for their synthesis, processing and characterization.
- Electro (photo) chemistry
- Catalysis
- Thermoconversion, electroconverssion and artificial photosynthesis.
- CO2 valorizationand Power to Gas or Liquids
- Renewable gases (hydrogen methane,…), synthetic fuels and added value chemical’s
- The development of knowledge and technology in lithium ion, redox flow, metal air batteries as well as in capacitor’s.Harvesting and storage for autonomous systems.
The activities of the group have led to the development of new technological approaches that have allowed us to obtain competitive prototypes of flow systems based on vanadium or organic electrolytes with very high performance with high values of energy efficiency and applied current density that demonstrate its feasibility at the industrial level. Likewise, we have obtained significant records in the performances of the new generation of LiS batteries working in regimes from 0.1C to 5C and new catalysts have been implemented for new outstanding releases of metal air batteries and photobatteries. The latter have become a disruptive alternative for electrical energy storage combined with self-consumption.
On the other hand, with the goal of building a decarbonized society based on a feasible energy transition in the industrial sectors, we are investigating the chemical storage of energy, the production of renewable fuels and the obtaining high value-added chemical products through sustainable procedures. So, based on the research carried out, new technological routes have been proposed for the efficient production of synthetic fuels in a high degree of efficiency, especially based on solar energy., The proposed technology route allow to achieve values of solar efficiency to hydrogen higher than 18% and solar to fuels greater than 15%. Likewise, activities are driven to the production of renewable gases (hydrogen, methane) at pilot plan level considering different sources of the required feedstock’s. Complementary work is being performed using thermoconversion processes based on the use of plasmas and new catalysts.
Our research activities are distributed across three major axes:
- Electrochemical batteries, with a focus on redox flow batteries – vanadium, organics, supercaps, lithium sulphur, advanced lithium ion and metal air batteries.
- Thermoconversion, electroconversion, bioconversion and photoconversion (artificial photosynthesis) technologies as new alternatives for the sustainable fuel production.
- Fully autonomous systems with reliable capacity for energy storage, essential for achieving smart energy management systems.
The Energy Storage, Harvesting and Catalysis group conducts cutting edge research in emergent technologies to facilitate the energy transition: from materials to reactors of disruptive electrochemical and chemical energy storage devices contributing to the society descarbonization by reducing CO2 emissions or reusing CO2. |
The laboratory equipment photos of Energy Storage, Harvesting and Catalysis research group are available in Multimedia Gallery.
