Together with team members from University of California Riverside, we (Team Nolux) won the NASA Deep Space Food Challenge Phase 2 Award! We proposed an artificial photosynthetic pathway to produce foods from CO2, H2O, and electricity, which has the potential to support NASA's manned deep space missions. The news announcement can be found [here]. 

Together with Dr. Seger and Dr. Robert, we discussed the issues faced when reporting performance of CO2 electrolysis technology and recommend how to move forward at both materials and device levels. The article has been published in Nature Sustainability. [Link to full article]

The ability of understanding the performance at a full device level is critical to rationally design new generation CO2 electrolyzer systems. In the Jiao lab, we developed a 5-electrode technique that is able to probe the resistance across different interfaces in a CO2 electrolyzer at work. With the new diagnostic tool, a record performance for CO2 electroreduction to CO was achieved. The key results were published in ACS Energy Letters. 

We recently introduce a new strategy to improve acetate selectivity in CO electrolysis. The combination of a Ni-Fe anode catalyst and a suitable anion exchange membrane enabled us to produce a highly concentrated acetate product stream with a high purity (>95%). This work represents a critical step towards commercial applications. The key results were published in Nature Catalysis. 

A joint publication with a team at University of California, Riverside was published in Nature Food. We demonstrated the feasibility to grow plants in dark using electrocatalytically CO2-derived acetate for the first time. The electrochemical-biological hybrid approach offers a completely new pathway for food production that overcomes the critical challenge associated with low efficiency in photosynthesis.

A perspective article was in JACS Au in which we discussed the emerging electrochemical technologies for decarbonizing the chemical industry.