In the latest round of federal research funding announced on Tuesday, 1 November, UNSW received 88 Discovery Project grants worth $32 million, 21 Discovery Early Career Research Awards (DECRA) worth over $7.5 million and 3 Linkage, Infrastrucrure, Equipment and Facilities grants (LIEF) worth $2.4 million. Among those received, PARTCAT researchers have scooped 3 Discovery projects (by Prof Rose Amal; Dr Yun Hau Ng, Dr Jason Scott and Dr Hamid Arandiyan), 1 DECRA project (Dr Xunyu Lu as CI) and 1 LIEF project (Led by Prof Rose Amal and team).
The succesful Discovery project led by Prof Rose Amal who teamed up with Dr Jason Scott and A/Prof. Francois Aguey Zinsou, titled Unlocking the catalytic activiy of metal oxides through hybrid catalysis, received $497,000 in funding. The project aims to understand the interaction of light responsive nano-metals and metal oxide supports in photo-thermal catalysis, and channel light and heat to efficiently drive catalytic reactions. From this understanding, it will develop principles to activate the active site of metal oxides and control catalytic activity with high selectivity and stability. It will use this knowledge to selectively oxidate methane and oxidative coupling of methane reactions. The expected outcome is an inexpensive green catalysis method for chemical manufacture.
Dr Yun Hau Ng and Dr Jason Scott's successful Discovery project (received $315K in funding) aims to convert and chemically store solar energy as hydrogen. Photoactive materials could harness solar energy. With fabrication methods, these thin films often suffer from poor charge transport and stability, hindering their wider application. Fabrication by anodization could potentially overcome these problems. This project will develop thin film fabrication methods based on anodization that synthesise robust, nanostructured films with efficient compositions and structures.
The third Discovery project investigated by Prof Sean Smith (IMDC) and Dr Hamid Arandiyan received $312K in funding to discover and design perovskite metal-oxide electrocatalyst materials and develop electrocatalytic methods for efficiently driving the oxygen evolution reaction and the oxygen reduction reaction.
Among the DECRA winner, Dr Xunyu Lu was awarded $370K to develop highly efficient integrated carbon dioxide electrolysis systems that can achieve overall solar-to-fuel energy efficiencies larger than the ten percent usually needed for practical applications; and the LIEF grants of $360K was awarded to establish thin film fabrication with catalytic/gas sorption characterisation needed for energy research.
Congratulations to all!
For full list of recipients go to ARC website.