Issue 29 – August 3rd, 2023

This work brings important results to increase the efficiency of carbon dioxide conversion into value-added compounds using energy from the Sun. The authors, researchers from the Dense Energy Carriers division and collaborators, added small amounts of copper to a bismuth-based catalyst and thereby they significantly optimized the photoconversion of the greenhouse gas to methanol and acetone.

• Go to the paper in the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology A: Chemistry.

Researchers from the Advanced Energy Storage division present a new contribution to the improvement of theoretical tools for the development of more efficient and lower cost batteries and supercapacitors. In the work, the authors take into account energy losses that actually occur during the operation of these devices but are usually neglected in research.

• Go to the paper in the Journal of Energy Storage.

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The director of CINE, Prof. Ana Flavia Nogueira is part of the international group of researchers interviewed by Chemistry of Materials in celebration of the journal’s 35th anniversary. In the mini-interview, the scientist talks about the challenges of materials research. The words of the director and other researchers were published in the editorial of the journal.

Researchers from CINE’s Dense Energy Carriers division and collaborators address in this work the oxidation of biomass derivatives, such as glycerol, to generate green hydrogen at low cost in electrolysers. Particularly, the authors investigate the use of perovskite oxides as catalysts for this process.

• Go to the paper in ACS Applied Energy Materials.

In this perspective article, researchers from CINE’s Dense Energy Carriers program and collaborators discuss the integration of organic molecules into different layers of perovskite solar cells – a strategy that has brought great advances to this photovoltaic technology. The authors show that the contribution of organic chemistry can be essential to enable the commercialization of perovskite solar cells.

• Go to the paper in Cell Reports Physical Science.

Prof Juarez L. F. Da Silva (IQSC-USP), CINE researcher and coordinator of Education and Dissemination of Knowledge at the center, shared a set of procedures, strategies and recommendations that helped him to publish more than 200 papers in international journals along with his research group, QTNano. The white paper was made available on the ResearchGate platform and can be accessed with no restrictions.

Prof Marcos Quiles (Unifesp), researcher at CINE’s Computational Science program, was in Athens (Greece) at the beginning of July, participating in the 23rd International Conference on Computational Science and its Applications (ICCSA 2023). At the event, Quiles presented the work “Guided Clustering for Selecting Representatives Samples in Chemical Databases”, in which he exposed advances achieved in the improvement of machine learning methods used to develop materials. The presentation by the CINE researcher can be accessed on the YouTube channel of the event, in this link, from minute 35.

Around 170 people, including students and researchers, participated in the 5th Workshop of the CINE Dense Energy Carriers (DEC) division, held on July 5th and 6th at UFSCar. The program featured 13 oral presentations by DEC researchers, who addressed advances in the development of perovskite solar cells, techniques for electrochemical processes study, production of green hydrogen, and conversion of CO2 into products, among other topics. In addition, 35 posters were presented by doctoral students and postdocs members, and four of them received awards from the organization of the event.

The Computational Materials Science and Chemistry (CMSC) division held the tenth edition of its workshop from June 26 to 30 in virtual format, through Google Meet. The event had around 40 participants, all CMSC members, and promoted a critical discussion of the projects carried out over the last five years and the upcoming possibilities. Almost all presentations were made available on ResearchGate.

The QTNano group, member of the Computational Materials Science and Chemistry division at CINE, now has a new laboratory at IQSC-USP. The 120-square-metre space, created with support from CINE, accommodates all the members of the group, who were previously divided into two separate spaces, and will bring greater integration and better working conditions.