Materials and construction materials play a significant role in developing systems for energy conversion and storage. Besides further technological developments and optimisations, fundamental innovations are expected, especially through research on new materials as well as through tailor-made material functionalisation. This is done on very different size scales. The spectrum ranges from macroscopic light-weight and composite materials, micro- and nano-structured surfaces to transport phenomena at atomic level.
Current problems address the development of long-term stable and high-efficiency electrode materials for hydrogen electrolysis, as well as for rechargeable metal-air batteries, the provision of catalytic surfaces in tube reactors for the methanisation of hydrogen with CO2 and the storage of hydrogen with LOHC – Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers. With the competences present at the member universities of EFZN basic research for a detailed understanding of the processes involved, as well as for the optimisation of process parameters for large-scale processing through different processes are investigated.