Australia’s premier chemistry and materials scientist, Professor Shizhang Qiao, is advancing renewable energy through his first-ever innovations in catalysis and aqueous batteries.
Renewable energy is essential for addressing climate change and securing a sustainable future. Experts say Australia could be powered entirely by renewable energy as soon as 2030, thanks to rapid industry growth. While this is a positive development, it brings new challenges: optimising and storing an increasing amount of energy. The University of Adelaide’s Professor Shizhang Qiao is tackling improved creation and storage of renewable energy with multiple breakthroughs in next-generation catalysts and aqueous batteries, advances that are solving problems across the lifecycle of renewable energy––putting us on track to a cleaner and brighter future.
Professor Shizhang Qiao, who Research.com has named both the best chemistry scientist and materials scientist in Australia, is ushering in a new generation of renewable energy technologies with his innovations in clean hydrogen energy production and grid-level battery storage. The School of Chemical Engineering professor has pioneered multiple world firsts in catalysis and aqueous batteries that he says have enormous environmental and economic benefits.
“These breakthroughs not only stabilise renewable energy use but also support economic growth by creating new industries, driving job creation, and reducing energy costs,” Qiao says.
One of Qiao’s groundbreaking research outcomes is developing new catalysts that enable highly efficient seawater electrolysis for green hydrogen production. While hydrogen is a clean energy source, traditional methods of producing it are environmentally flawed; the processes rely on precious metals like platinum and iridium and purified water that requires desalination or alkalisation, which are expensive and energy-intensive.
Qiao is making the path to hydrogen energy more cost-effective and resource-efficient by zooming in on how catalysts, the mechanisms that help efficiently split water into hydrogen and oxygen, work at an atomic level. With the help of theoretical computer modelling and the creation of new chemical compounds, Qiao undertook an accelerated experimental process to design new catalysts that don’t require pre-treatment or precious metals. His research marks the first time non-precious metal catalysts demonstrated performance comparable to the previous platinum-based systems on purified water.