HYBRID EVENT: You can participate in person at Singapore or Virtually from your home or work.
Davood Fathi, Speaker at CatalysisConferences
Tarbiat Modares University, Iran (Islamic Republic of)
Title : Catalysts in Water-Splitting

Abstract:

Although many catalysts have been proven worthy to accelerate chemical reactions, there is still the challenge of finding a more efficient and optimized catalyst; thus, it is crucial that researchers learn about various compounds. In recent years, due to the shortage of energy, water-splitting solar cells that directly convert solar energy into chemical energy have attracted growing attention. In order to achieve maximum performance of these cells, catalysts are used to speed the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and generate hydrogen fuel.

In a photo-electrochemical (PEC) water-splitting cell (Figure 1), catalyst plays an important role in improving the photoinduced electron and hole separation/transportation, works as the active site to previously mentioned reactions, decreases the probability of photo-corrosion and increases the chemical stability of photoelectrodes. As the reaction in PEC water-splitting cells will happen on the photoelectrodes’ surface, surface-decoration with catalyst is needed. To promote the reaction, perovskite oxides are considered great visible-light-active electrocatalysts which consist of a huge variety of compounds. Besides the fact that finding the efficient material as a catalyst is the main issue, figuring out new methods to optimize the catalysts’ performance matters as well. It is also important to consider catalysts and cocatalysts to be earth-abundant and cost-efficient.

In my proposed presentation, I will discuss how using an efficient catalyst will benefit the outcome results of different chemical reactions, optimizing new methods over conventional methods to develop convenient and frugal catalysts, and innovative process technologies to use catalysts as particles with different morphologies or layers.

Biography:

Dr. Davood Fathi received the B.Sc. degree in the field of electronic engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1990, and the M.Sc. degree in the field of biomedical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1994. After a couple of years working in industry, he worked toward the Ph.D. degree between 2006-2009 in the field of nanoelectronics with the Nanoelectronic Center of Excellence, Thin Film and Photonics Research Laboratory, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
Dr. Fathi has joined from 2010 as a member of faculty to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University (TMU), Tehran, Iran. He has been the reviewer for more than 15 international journals including IEEE, OSA, Elsevier, Springer, and so on.
His current research interests include: Nanoelectronics; Nanophotonics and Optoelectronics; Solar cells and Water-splitting systems; Nanobiophotonics; Computational Optics-Photonics. He is also author or co-author of more than 85 scientific journal and conference papers in various fields of Nanoelectronics and Photonics, which most of the high impact publications during the past three years are in the field of solar energy.
Dr. Fathi is currently an Associate Professor of Photonics and Optoelectronics at his department.

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