Grant: Applied Research Tools and Instruments Grants

Today, the burning of fossil fuels is closely associated with climate change, acid rain and global warming. Furthermore, the prospect of finding significant new oil and gas fields is slim. Even if significant new reserves of fossil fuels are discovered, will we be willing to live with the consequences of ""burning"" them? Energy issues such as resource depletion, energy security, end-use efficiency, and climate change require deep thinking and timely solutions. Alternative fuels can play a vital role in alleviating some of the aforementioned problems and challenges facing humanity. Hydrogen is regarded as the energy carrier of choice, but its production based on conventional methods requires significant amount of primary energy, mostly supplied by fossil-based fuels. The proposed project aims to create two novel yet practical solutions to produce hydrogen in a cost-effective and environmentally sensitive fashion without relying on fossil-based fuels. One pathway involves the utilization of titania nanotubes for the production and the other employs microalgae and customized photo-bioreactors to generate hydrogen. One of the major challenges with both systems is the diffusion of light beams inside the photo-bioreactor to reach titania nanotubes or microalgae without significant loss of intensity. Therefore, the need for a new class of reactors with high efficiency is evident. Additionally, the widespread deployment of such systems has been impaired by the wide band-gap of pure titania requiring ultraviolet irradiation for titania nanotubes and the inhibiting nature of photosynthetic oxygen evolution in biophotolysis-based hydrogen production. The primary aim of this research project is to address such issues.