FeSTEN

Global energy consumption is projected to increase in the future years because of population and economic growth. This evolution requires the invention and development of new carbon-neutral energy sources at a high scale in order to supply this demand while maintaining the atmospheric CO2 content at a low level. To fulfill this need, solar energy seems by far the largest exploitable sustainable resource, but due to the period of sunshine intermittency, it has to be stored and dispatch. One of the attractive approaches consists in storing solar energy in terms of chemical energy through the formation of chemical bonds, which is achieved by the photosynthetic process. In this context, this proposal focuses on one of the ‘hydrogen economy’ paradigm, namely the preparation of cheap, sustainable and robust catalyst for dihydrogen evolution/uptake. We propose here to prepare and characterize Fe/S nanoparticles as bio-inspired catalysts and study the catalytic activity of such materials by the mean of electrochemistry. The two partners involved in this project are combining their expertise from their respective fields, nanomaterial preparation and characterization on one hand, and electrochemistry on the other hand, to design and improve catalysts from simple and cheap starting materials.