Research Interest:
Yuan Hu’s overall research interest is to explore the unknowns in new energy area, especially in converting various energy sources into transportable, preservable, environmentally friendly and safer energy in chemical forms. Our current and future generations could benefit from these researches by realizing more efficient energy utilization and creating a better homeland. Although Yuan has very limited knowledge in the whole regime of energy and environment related issues, but he is very passionate to broad his vision from chemistry area into multidiscipline, including engineering, economics and politics. Yuan’s current research interests are shown as followings:
1) Photoelectrochemically covert CO2 into carbon based energy-rich organics on various semiconducting materials based photocathodes catalyzed by different nitrogen containing heterocyclic catalysts.
2) Mechanistically study the formation of carbon-carbon bonds in the conversion process of CO2 in the above mentioned systems, to gain enough information for a further optimization and controllable production.
3) Solid-state syntheses of photoactive materials for stable and high-efficiency photocathode fabrication.
4) Fuel cells related topics, especially in super capacitors and catalysts for releasing high-density energy by destroying carbon-carbon bonds in multicarbon fuels.