Research Directions
Sustainable energy and clean environment are key global challenges in the 21st century. Our research are focused on design and synthesis of porous materials for energy and environmental applications, in applications such as membranes for molecular separations, heterogeneous catalysis, and energy conversion and storage.
The group is interdisciplinary and motivated to basic research but with interests in practical applications of our research in oil & gas, chemical, and energy industries. The group combines knowledge of materials chemistry, polymer physics, porous materials, nanotechnology, and chemical engineering science, to design novel materials for emerging energy and environmental applications. Our research topics cover the following areas:
- Design and Synthesis of Functional Porous Materials. Design and synthesis of functional materials, such as microporous polymers, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), layered materials and metal oxides, nanostructured carbon materials, and composite materials.
- Microporous Membranes for Molecular Separations. Design and fabrication of polymers and porous materials into microporous membranes for molecular-level separations in energy and environmental processes, such as gas separation, liquid separation, and water purification and desalination, and electrodialysis separation processes.
- Nanostructured Materials for Energy Conversion and Storage. Design and synthesis of electrode materials, ion-exchange membranes and separators for electrochemical devices, such as redox flow batteries, fuel cells and water electrolysers.
- Energy and Environmental Catalysis and Reaction Engineering. Design and synthesis of porous materials and nanostructured catalysts for applications in electrochemical and thermochemical reaction engineering, such as production of renewable fues, renewable H2 production, CO2 capture and conversion.
Rational design of these novel materials for functional applications requires a fundamental understanding of their physical and chemical properties at the molecular level, such as chemical structure, macromolecular structure and crystalline structure, and linking the structures with their bulk properties over multi-magnitudes of scale. A broad scientific approach is used aiming to understand their physical and chemical properties that dominate the processes of molecular and ionic transport, adsorption/absorption and diffusion, and chemical reactions. The group are working on synthetic chemistry and collaborating extensively with chemists and materials scientists. Extensive physical and chemical characterization techniques are used to establish the structure-property relationships, building a fundamental background for their scale-up and commercialization to industrially useful products.
Since 2016, with the support of department start-up fund and ERC Starting Grant, our team has advanced the development of advanced membrane materials for energy conversion and storage, molecular and ion separation, and sustainable processes. So far, our group and collaborators (especially, Prof Neil McKeown at University of Edinburgh and Prof Kim Jelfs at Imperial) have developed novel membranes with various polymer chemistries for flow batteries, including PIM polymers with amidoxime groups (Nature Materials, 2020), Tröger’s base (Advanced Science, 2023); carboxylate groups (Advanced Materials, 2022; Nature, 2024, accepted), three-dimensional rigid backbones (Angew Chem, 2022), sulfonated PIMs (Nature Commun., 2022), sulfonated poly(ether-ether-ketone) (Joule, 2022; Joule, 2024), and sulfonated polyxanthene (Angew Chem, 2020). The concept could also be extended to other aqueous batteries, such as zinc-metal batteries (Angew Chem Int Ed. 2024). PIM membranes could radically improve the performance of advanced batteries where fast ion transport and selectivity are crucial limiting factors. These studies have generated broad academic impact and inspired further research worldwide, as evidenced by the award of Royal Society of Chemistry Materials Chemistry Horizon Prize. Several new polymers stand out as promising candidates that may lead to commercial success, for redox flow batteries, fuel cells, electrolysers, and electrodialysis separation processes. The team has filed one PCT patent on the ion exchange membranes (PCT/EP2024/075338) and won UKRI IAA and ERC proof-of-concept grants to scale up the manufacturing of these membranes. A start-up company is being established to explore the commercialization of the membranes and their broad applications for energy and sustainable processes.