Electricity generated from renewable sources has approached an important threshold - it is now more cost effective to install solar or wind farms than to build coal power plants. Predicted trajectories indicate that these renewable sources may become more cost effective than existing coal plants within a decade. The declining cost of renewable energy presents an opportunity for our society to reinvent itself. The Smith Group designs, fabricates and characterizes solid-state materials and studies their application as electrocatalysts – the goal is to develop processes that utilize clean electricity to directly convert waste chemicals into value-added chemicals.
Our research revolves around the design, fabrication and characterization of solid state materials. State-of-the-art fabrication and characterization facilities at the University of Waterloo enables fabrication and complete structural characterization of our solid-state materials. We then employ the latest techniques in spectroelectrochemistry to analyze the behavior of electrocatalysts before, during and after electrocatalytic operation. Reaction mechanisms developed from this information is then used to guide catalyst design and fabrication.
