Yun Hang Hu

Thermo-Photo Catalytical Hydrogen Production

The critical issues of fossil fuels are their limited natural sources and contribution to the increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases. To solve those issues, hydrogen is being developed as a promising alternative fuel. Furthermore, solar energy is the largest energy source and technologies are being developed to exploit solar energy efficiently. Visible-light photocatalytic splitting of water to hydrogen is attractive, but its efficiency is poor due to insufficient driving force. In the recent years, Prof. Hu’s group demonstrated a new strategy by introducing thermal energy as kinetic energy to increase the driving force for the visible light photocatalytic process, leading to 100 times increase in efficiency. Actually, this created a new type of catalysis, “Thermo-Photo Catalysis”. In this talk, he will discuss the thermo-photo catalytic hydrogen production from water with emphasis on reaction mechanism and the synergetic effect of thermal/photo energies.

Dr. Yun Hang Hu is the inaugural Charles and Carroll McArthur Endowed Chair Professor at Michigan Technological University. He is a fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a fellow of American Physical Society (APS), a fellow of American Chemical Society (ACS), a fellow of American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), a fellow of ASM international (ASM), and a fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). He was elected as the chair of the Energy and Fuels Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 2014 and the president of the Hydrogen Storage Division of International Association of Hydrogen Energy (IAHE) in 2015. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Energy Science & Engineering, an editor for four ACS series books, and an editorial board member for 8 international journals. He gave more than 160 invited talks (including 50 plenary/keynote talks) to international conferences, universities, and research centers. His main research interests range from nanomaterials, clean fuels, energy devices, hydrogen storage materials, CO2 conversion, catalysis, quantum chemistry calculations to solar energy. He has published about 300 papers in prestigious journals.