July 2017

Javier and Daniel attended the president's garden party to accept the President’s Award for Excellence in Research 2017 on behalf of the Kucernak group.

June 2017

Kieran presented a talk on fuel cell poisoning mitigation at the STFC conference in Abingdon.

Anthony went to the Birmingham FC & Hydrogen conference. A spinout from the Kucernak group, Bramble energy, had a stand. 

Anthony also went to Vancouver for a CarpeFC fuel cell network meeting then gave a talk at Ballard Fuel Cells.

May 2017

The Kucernak group won a President’s Award for Excellence in Research 2017 – Excellence in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The announcement is here.

April 2017 

Jacek and Matt are also leaving the Kucernak group this month. Jacek worked in the group for three years developing coatings for bipolar plates and will continue his coating research in industry. Matt is staying in fuel cell research and is moving to Vancouver to take up a position with Ballard Fuel Cells.

RFC power, a redox flow battery spinout from the group involving Anthony and Javier, was selected to join the Climate-KIC accelerator programme.

March 2017 

Best of luck to Tiziana who is leaving the group to rejoin industry, starting a new research project at Arvia Technologies in Manchester.

February 2017 

Congratulations to Daniel who won the Chemistry Department award for best PhD thesis. 

January 2017

The Kucernak group had a sucessful grant application as part of an EU framework 2020-funded project “MEMPHYS: (MEMbrane based Purification of HYdrogen System)”. The MEMPHYS projects involves the application of multiple hydrogen sources with integrated compression up to 200 bar, which significantly facilitates the transport and storage of hydrogen. Work at Imperial College London will examine new hydrogen oxidation catalysts, and advanced catalytic cleaning processes as part of the anode development. 

December 2016

Anthony, Kieran, Javier and Daniel all presented talks at the H2FC Supergen conference in Belfast.

November 2016

Welcome to our new MSci and MRes students Madeleine Laitz, Xiaoqian Lin, Joshua Sucher, Jun Wu, Danlei Li, Yanjun Guo and Sung-Ho Lee who will be working in the group for the next months.

Daniel and Anthony published a JACS paper ' Performance of Fe-N/C Oxygen Reduction Electrocatalysts toward NO2-, NO, and NH2OH Electroreduction: From Fundamental Insights into the Active Center to a New Method for Environmental Nitrite Destruction'. The open access link is here.

Anthony, Kieran and Biraj published a paper on fuel cell poisoning in Electrochimica Acta entitled 'Using corrosion-like processes to remove poisons from electrocatalysts: a viable strategy to chemically regenerate irreversibly poisoned polymer electrolyte fuel cells'. The link is here.

Javier, Anthony and their collaborators in the Earth Science Department published 'Performance Enhancement of Reduced Graphene Oxide-Modified Carbon Electrodes for Vanadium Redox-Flow Systems' in ChemElectrochem. The link is here.

October 2016

Congratulations to Daniel who submitted his PhD thesis and was awarded a 2016 EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship to continue with his research in the Kucernak group.

Daniel also managed to publish a paper in Nature Communications this month, along with Anthony and Thiago Lopes, who is a former postdoc in the Kucernak group. The paper is entitled 'In situ electrochemical quantification of active sites in Fe–N/C non-precious metal catalysts' and outlines a method to determine the number of catalytically active sites in non-precious metal catalysts for fuel cells. The accepted manuscript is available here.

Anthony, Kieran and Max all went to Hawaii to present the Electrochemical Society PRiMe conference 2016. Anthony presented an invited talk on 'Modelling and Experimental Results for the Hydrogen Oxidation/Hydrogen Evolution Reactions: New Insights into the Performance of Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells and Electrolyzers, Kieran presented 'Metal meshes as GDls for PEMFCs' and Max talked about 'Extending the Life-Time of Low Cost Fuel Cells'.

Anthony also published a paper with Leonora Velleman, a former group member, in Nanoscale entitled 'Tuneable 2D self-assembly of plasmonic nanoparticles at liquid | liquid interfaces'. The article due to be featured on the front cover of the next issue, the accepted manuscript is here.

September 2016

Congratulations to our MRes students, Kai-Ling, Pip, Dong and Yihong who completed their courses by presenting their research to the members of the department. Also, well-done to Kai-Ling who won first prize for her presentation.

The Kucernak group has been awarded a grant by the EU under the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking to investigate membrane-based hydrogen production and purification with a number of partners from Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Slovenia.

Matt attended the Gordon Research conference on Fuel cells in Stonehill College, MA to present a poster about the recent discoveries made using the floating electrode.

Daniel and Anthony published a paper entitled 'Mechanistic insights into the ORR on Metal–N–C electrocatalysts under fuel cell conditions' in ChemElectroChem. The article is here.

August 2016

Daniel attended the International Society of Electrochemistry conference in the Hague to present his paper on ‘In-situ electrochemical quantification of active sites in Fe-N/C non-precious metal catalysts’.

June 2016

Congratulations to the Sweet Gen team, a spinout from the Kucernak group, who won the first prize in the RSC Emerging Technologies Competition, Food and Water section. Their project is entitled 'Abiotic wastewater fuel cell for water remediation and electricity generation'. 

SweetGen Ltd’s abiotic fuel cell-like system produces electricity from organic contaminants which are found in wastewater produced in a number of different industries. The system also has the additional benefit of cleaning these organic contaminants from the water.

May 2016

Welcome to Tiziana, Andres and Martin who have joined the group and will be working on the abiotic wastewater fuel cell and on the Symbiotic project, detecting cancer using fuel cells.

Anthony published a paper with Chris Zalitis in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C entitled 'General Models for the Electrochemical Hydrogen Oxidation and Hydrogen Evolution Reactions: Theoretical Derivation and Experimental Results under Near Mass-Transport Free Conditions'. 

Daniel and Anthony’s paper was published in the Journal of Power Sources. ‘A catalyst layer optimisation approach using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy for PEM fuel cells operated with pyrolysed transition metal-N-C catalysts’ is available here.

April 2016

Anthony published a paper with a former group member Biraj Kakati in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy. The title was 'Recovery of Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cell exposed to sulphur dioxide'.

January 2016

Congratulations to Matt, who has been awarded a 2015 Fondazione Oronzio e Niccolò De Nora Fellowship in Applied Electrochemistry. He will investigate 'Gas Diffusion Electrodes with Tunable Transport Channels for Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells'. 

Daniel and Anthony have published a paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A on 'The intriguing poison tolerance of non-precious metal oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) catalysts', the open-access full text is available here.

Anthony contributed to a review on 'Fundamentals and applications of self-assembled plasmonic nanoparticles at interfaces'. The article was published in Chemical Society Reviews and is available here.

October 2015

Anthony, Venkat and Kieran's paper "Facile synthesis of palladium phosphide electrocatalysts and their activity for the hydrogen oxidation, hydrogen evolutions, oxygen reduction and formic acid oxidation reactions" has been accepted to Catalysis Today. The article will be available online soon.

Matt, Chris and Anthony have just seen their latest article "Performance measurements and modelling of the ORR on fuel cell electrocatalysts – the modified double trap model", published in Electrochimica Acta. The article is available here.

September 2015

Welcome to our new Masters students Polly, Kai Ling, Pip, Dong and Yihong, arriving this term to start some research in the Kucernak lab.

July 2015

Congratulations to our MSc. students Alexandra Charleson, Yuchen Tang and Zhuo Zheng on their results.

June 2015

Good luck to Javier Rubio-Garcia and Daniel Malko who have been selected as finalists in the RSC's Emerging Technologies Competition 2015. Their project "Sweet Generator" seeks to produce power from industrial wastewater.