For the energy transition to succeed, we need efficient energy storage. There are many ideas for this, but one of the decisive challenges remains the search for suitable materials: if you want to split water into hydrogen and oxygen or convert carbon dioxide from the air, for example, you need suitable catalysts with very specific physical-chemical properties.
The search for, analysis and improvement of such materials is now being pursued at TU Wien in a large-scale scientific project: On 1 October 2023, the Cluster of Excellence "Materials for Energy Conversion and Storage (MECS)" was officially launched. In March, the Austrian Science Fund FWF had selected the project in a highly competitive procedure: A total budget of 35 million euros is available for the next five years, 20 million of which will come from the FWF, 15 will be provided by the institutions themselves. Together with several research groups from the Faculties of Chemistry and Physics at TU Wien, teams from the University of Vienna, the University of Innsbruck and ISTA are also involved.
A lot of experience at the University of Vienna
The University of Vienna is involved in all three pillars of the project: Jani Kotakoski from the Physics of Nanostructured Materials (Pillar A), Davide Bonifazi from the Institute of Organic Chemistry (Pillar B) and Leticia González from the Institute of Theoretical Chemistry and last but not least Georg Kresse from the Computational Materials Physics group (Pillar C).
The development and research of photo-activated processes has played an important role at the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Vienna for many years. The Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna is a leader in the field of quantum mechanical simulations of materials with the VASP programme package and has outstanding expertise in the observation of processes using transmission electron microscopes. This expertise will be further expanded and more closely linked in the new Cluster of Excellence and should thus contribute significantly to solving the problems at hand.
