Author: Ana Belen Jorge Sobrido

At the end of the staff meeting on the 11th December 2024 and just before the SEMS annual Christmas Staff Party, we hosted our annual SEMS Staff Prize Celebration. We had a record number of nominations this year with the awards being spread across the entire SEMS community. Ana was awarded the Research Environment Award, as an acknowledgement of her efforts to lead research activities and support early career researchers.

Hattie has been awarded the prize to the best Sustainable Engineering Centre research poster at the ILF event held on Tuesday 5th November 2024.

Hattie’s poster summarised her PhD project ‘Carbon Dioxide Conversion to Value-Added Chemicals via Electroreduction’ which she is conducting in Prof Ana Sobrido’s group.

Hattie research focuses on the design and manufacturing of freestanding carbon fibre electrodes decorated with metal electrocatalysts. She uses electrospinning to process lignin and polyacrylonitrile intro fibres of controlled diameter and surface chemistry.

The addition of copper, gold or silver nanoparticles promotes their activity to catalyse the electroreduction of carbon dioxide into valuable products. These products are analysed by gas chromatography technique and may include carbon monoxide, methane and formaldehyde.

Prof Ana Jorge Sobrido gave an invited talk at the STFC Battery Annual Meeting held at the Cosener House in Abingdon (23rd- 24th September 2024).

The meeting is an opportunity to engage with UK researchers working in the field of batteries and other electrochemical technologies.

Ana presented her group’s work on the use of electrospinning and 3D-printing to produce alternative electrode materials for application in flow batteries.

Professor Ana Sobrido’s contributions to chemical sciences have been recognised this year by her admission as Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Prof Sobrido’s research targets the design and optimisation of sustainable alternatives to materials for energy conversion and storage.

Her UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship develops new strategies to tailor 3D porous structures for efficient electrodes using biomass waste resources. Her group’s work has led to new understanding of structure-property relationships in these systems and the chemical and structural factors affecting mass transport and charge transfer mechanisms in redox flow batteries.

Her research activities also span to the areas of electrocatalysis and photoelectrocatalysis, where Prof Sobrido’s group has pioneered work on unraveling the role of single atom co-catalyst for photoassisted water oxidation and has developed electron spin selective systems for enhanced electrocatalytic performance.

This is the latest recognition of her work, following her 2023 shortlisting for the Journal Materials Chemistry Lectureship.

 gave an invited seminar on electrospun flow battery electrodes and the use of sustainable precursors into the production of these electrode materials.

Prof Sobrido’s work on designing the next generation of redox flow batteries electrospinning is part of her UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship research programme.

Her group’s research has led pioneering work on the use of biomass-waste to replace petrol-derived materials in flow battery electrodes. She says “If we want to move away from fossil fuels and rely only on renewables, the components of the next generation of energy storage technologies should not be petrol-derived.”

The group have therefore found ways of processing lignin and other biomass-waste products into freestanding materials, which can then be easily assembled into batteries. Using electrospinning and 3D-printing, they can manufacture these waste products into sustainable electrodes.

During the seminar, one of the students in attendance asked about the lack of reproducibility when working with biomass. Biomass is inherently different depending of where it comes from, and these differences in composition and structure can lead to some variability in performance. This leaves researchers with a decision to make – are they willing to compromise some degree of variability for a more sustainable device? Prof Sobrido and her group are considering different variabilities and different applications in order to answer this question.

During her trip, Prof Sobrido met Dr Antoni Forner Cuenca, Associate Professor and his research team at TU Eindhoven, as well as catching a seminar from Prof Johan Hjelm from Technical University of Denmark.

The group was well represented at the MRS Seattle Spring 2024. Thanks to the organisation for inviting Ana to give a talk and the rest of the team: Hattie, Jesus, Carlos, Mauricio and Michael who also presented their work. We had time to explore Seattle which is such a wonderful city!

Thanks to Maria Crespo, Heather Au, Marina Freitag and team for such a fantastic tour of the battery landscape and next generation of more sustainable technologies. Plenty of hands on demos making batteries out of food! What a great way to spend a day of British summer weather!

@FutureBatt

Maria and Ana presented their approaches to sustainable energy storage at the Night of Science and Engineering, held at The Octagon, on the 29th February 2024.

We need batteries to store energy from renewables to be able to cope with their inherent intermittency and move away from fossil fuels.

However, those batteries should also be engineered with sustainable and abundant resources that do not rely on fossil fuels either.

At the Night of Science and Engineering, they showcased their approaches to sustainable batteries based on the use of recycled materials and biomass resources combined with innovative processing techniques.

Thanks Carlos, Hattie and Michael! It was such a great event. Feel very proud of you all! 🙂

Ana was invited to give a talk at the IIWPECE held at the Universidad La Laguna, in Tenerife. This is the institution where Ana did her degree in Chemistry, which she finished in 2004. 20 years later she was back to close the cycle as Professor. Time really flies!

The QMUL Flow Battery Symposium was held at The Colette Bowen room on the 25th January 2024 and counted with very engaging speakers, including Prof Fikile Brushett (MIT), Emma Latchem (Cambridge), Dr Michael Thielke (QMUL), Dr Qilei Song (Imperial), Prof Rob Dryfe (Manchester), Dr. Qing Dai (Cambridge), Alex Quinn (MIT) and Dr Hugh O’Connor (Belfast). Thanks to all the participants for a fantastic event!