M-2043 – PHD STUDENT/NEW CONCEPTS FOR PEC WATER SPLITTING

The MRT department is looking for 8 talented candidates to join the HYMAT Doctoral Training Unit (4-years PhD studentships) supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR). HYMAT is a large and multidisciplinary project that focuses on the discovery and development of materials for hydrogen generation and utilization. HYMAT is built around 8 highly complementary research axes, which will address key materials challenges faced in establishing specific technologies that will underpin the hydrogen economy. The 8 PhD students will be supervised by experienced scientists and be granted access to state-of-the-art infrastructure to perform research on a topic at the forefront of societal and scientific discussion.

The PhD student will work in the framework of the HYMAT research axis #4. The development of high-performance photoanode materials is a bottleneck towards an application-relevant involvement of earth-abundant elements in photoelectrochemical water splitting. Transition metal oxides and nitrides are efficient electrocatalysts and a number of them possess appropriate band gap to absorb a large fraction of solar radiation. Efforts foreseen in this PhD will address the material engineering to secure a proper alignment of the energy levels with water redox potentials; and the design or carbon nanotubes (CNT)-supported co-axial heterostructures to decouple and enhance the material’s properties and address the following points:

• Enhance sunlight trapping and absorption via a porous structure
• Enhance charge separation and increase of the resulting photovoltage by decoupling light penetration depth and diffusion length of minority carriers
• Engineer band structure to enhance the reaction kinetics and improve stability

Funding category: Financement public/privé

PHD Country: France