Combinatorial Approaches for Clean Energy Materials

The proposed book focuses on the use of combinatorial and high throughput screening methodology towards the discovery of materials necessary to produce and store clean sustainable energy. The focus is two areas of research that have recently gained world-wide interest due to the rising cost and associated pollution of fossil fuel usage: the production and storage of hydrogen and the production and storage of electrons.For the production of hydrogen from renewable sources (i.e. water) the focus is on materials discovery towards solar water splitting. Key requirements in such materials include band gap engineering and electron transport agents to improve overall efficiency. Such improvements in efficiency are required to enable economically feasible production of hydrogen from a renewable source. For hydrogen storage materials the focus is for transportation. The physical and chemical properties required for such a material include limits on hydrogen volumetric and weight storage capacities, hydriding thermodynamics and kinetics, safety and cost. The challenge to discover new materials to meet these criteria is immense given the magnitude of change required for the properties of a successful material.
For the production and storage of clean energy in the form of electrons, fuel cells and battery materials discovery will also be covered. Materials challenges for PEM, SOFC fuel cells and batteries include new and inexpensive electrode materials that demonstrate faster reaction kinetics, lower polarization resistance accompanying chemical and thermal stability. Also important is device fabrication that generates materials interfaces where the majority of electron and ionic transfer takes place and can dominate the performance and life time of fuel cells and batteries. Several groups have developed sophisticated methods to screen such materials, ranging from arrays of electrodes to complete devices.