Askes Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2023

Heat in the driver’s seat: unlocking the full potential of pulsed photothermal catalysis

The climate catastrophe urgently calls for greening and intensifying chemical reactors. Most chemical reactors use catalysts to speed up reactions, but their operation at steady-state temperature impairs rate, selectivity, and energy efficiency. To go beyond these limitations, applying short heat pulses theoretically leads to >100× higher reaction yield, lower energy use, and a controlled product distribution. However, pulsed heating has remained out of reach because it is hard to heat catalysts selectively and fast enough. I break this paradigm and take control of dynamic thermo-catalysis by using light pulses and robust “plasmonic” materials that convert light to heat with nanoscale…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.