Multinary Material Systems for Energy and Sustainability

The lab of Hannah-Noa Barad focuses on investigation of multinary (many element) materials that are used for the formation of sustainable fuels and energy. The multinary materials are used as catalysts to form clean sustainable fuels and in photovoltaics. For example, some of the reactions we investigate lead to the formation of H₂ (e.g., by water splitting) to be used as an energy source, or carbon-based fuels like CH₃CH₂OH (e.g., by CO₂ reduction). The methods we employ in the lab include machine learning techniques to for rational design and prediction new multinary materials and combinatorial synthesis approaches to fabricate large area libraries of multinary materials with compositional and morphological gradients. The material libraries’ physical, electrical, and chemical properties are then studied using a myriad of different techniques, all of which are built for high-throughput measurements and analysis. All the data we gather in stored in a very large database in the lab. The multinary compounds of interest that we discover are studied in-depth to investigate their working mechanisms and what drives their activity to form clean fuels. The combination of rational design and combinatorial science leads to rapid breakthroughs and state-of-the-art material systems, which will outperform currently used materials and bring about faster and more advanced solutions to the climate crisis.