UV

The baseline technology for green H2 production is the water-electrolysis (WE). However, roughly 96% of the H2 produced today is from fossil fuels, with the remaining 4% produced through water electrolysis , due to the still-high costs, and lower performance of current electrolysers compared with other production processes not affected by the use of toxic or critical raw materials (CRM). Therefore, there is a need of boosting the development of highly active and efficient catalysts to turn green hydrogen into a viable solution to decarbonise different sectors and to meet the ambitious goals settled in the Hydrogen Strategy. This project proposes an advanced Anion Exchange Membrane Water Electrolyser (AEMWE) stack as a critical milestone to translate the highly promising results coming from the ground-breaking research conducted during the ERC-StG awarded to Dr G. Abellán, into a marketable innovation. The AEMWE stack novelty relies on non-toxic CRM-free breakthrough novel electrodes (anodes) made of two-dimensional (2D) nickel-iron layered double hydroxide materials (2D NiFe-LDHs) that have shown an outstanding catalytic behaviour. Using this electrocatalytic material will allow overcoming the main challenges of WE to produce green H2. The activities to be undertaken under the 2D4H2 project, are aimed to prepare the translation of the 2D NiFe-LDHs electrocatalytic materials into an AEMWE stack as a precursor of a future fully operational 0.5kW electrolyser. For this purpose, the necessary optimisation and characterisation of the electrocatalyst to enable the testing and validation in a pilot plant of the single unit cell, and the AEMWE stack prototype, will be carried out together with the elaboration of an integrated strategy for effectively managing the knowledge generated during the project, including clarifying the IPR position, and an exploitation strategy involving potential stakeholders in order to evolve the idea further towards exploitation.

This project is aimed at applying laccases enzymes from lactic acid bacteria (LAB) to eliminate undesirable substances in wines such as toxic compounds (biogenic amines-BA and ochratoxin A-OTA) and off-flavors (volatile phenols - VP) produced from yeasts, fungi and bacteria during the winemaking process. Wine has become a daily consuming-product and the EU is the world’s leading wine producer (60% of world production). To guarantee food quality and safety control for consumers, winemakers normally use physical and chemical methods to reduce toxins and off-flavours in wines, which will be replaced with LAB laccases to avoid environmental and health problems. The main objective of this project is to explore the structure, practical applications, and the activity of LAB laccases on BA, OTA and VP in wines and determine and quantify their degradation products in order to improve the wine quality. Specific objectives are to look for new LAB enzymes to eliminate aromatic defects and toxins in wine and determine their degrading products on BA, OTA and VP, to explore their structure and new applications, to discover chaperons that improve laccases expression and to evaluate the enzymatic activity on wine quality. In order to accomplish these objectives, four stages of the project have been established, which include the genome mining and laccases expression and purification, their activity evaluation in wine and the search of the protein structure. To achieve all these goals, it is required a large combination of technical and transversal skills that will greatly improve the potential of the candidate to become a leader in wine bacteria biotechnology given his background as Biochemical Engineer and his previous experience as researcher in the line of biochemical processes modelling and to enhance his employability opportunities. The knowledge and results generated from this project can be transferred to the wine/food industry with great benefits in quality and safety.

Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) – porous materials with almost unlimited chemical and structural diversity - have incited an interesting alternative to the drawbacks that nanotechnology is currently facing. The defect engineering of MOFs has been used as a tool to modify their porosity, chemical reactivity and electronic conductivity among other properties, but research is still limited in the vast majority towards Zr-MOFs. Notably, defect chemistry of Ti-MOFs remains unexplored despite that the pristine materials photoactivity, chemical and structural stability and Titanium being an abundant biocompatible metal. This project, entitled `Defective Titanium Metal-Organic-Frameworks(DefTiMOFs)’ aims to develop novel high-throughput (HT)synthetic methodologies for the control of not only defect chemistry of Ti-MOFs,but also of their particle size and inner surface (porefunctionalisation) towards the controllable modification of their properties. HT synthesis will be convened with a set of novel characterisation techniques (mainly synchrotron-based) for atomic and molecular level of characterisation of defects, aiming to correlate synthetic conditions with defect formation (defect type, densityand spatial distribution within the framework)in order to provide thebase of knowledge to anticipate their properties based on the synthetic conditions. This will then allow for defect engineering of MOFs using a wide range of materials. In view of the above and inspired by the high demand for clean and renewable energy sources including efficient and affordablewater delivery systems in places with limited access to drinkablewater, the DefTiMOFs project aims to correlate defect chemistry of Ti-MOFs with their performance towards environmentally friendly applications. This will lead to the ultimate design of materials with outstanding performance in heterogeneous catalysis, photocatalysis (hydrogen production) and water harvesting from air.

The purpose of Hy-MAC is to assess both technical and economic viability of using magnetic nanocomposites based on the combination of carbon nanoforms (graphene) with magnetic nanoparticle as hybrid supercapacitors. These hybrid magnetic materials have shown to exhibit unique supercapacitive properties, which can be significantly enhanced by application of an external magnetic field. Thus, the specific capacitance increases up to a 500% by applying an external magnetic field. Taking advantage of these results, in this proposal we plan to fabricate and test prototype supercapacitive devices exhibiting better performances than those reported for commercial supercapacitors.