January 2022 Meeting

AIChE Chicago January Virtual Meeting

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

“Beyond Adsorption” Phenomena In Electrocatalytic Hydrogen Reactions

Dr. Maureen Tang

Professor, Chemical and Biological Engineering, Drexel University

Speaker Biography:

Maureen Tang joined the faculty of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Drexel University in 2014. She received her B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007, and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012. While at Berkeley, Maureen Tang received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, an NSF East Asia Pacific Summer Fellowship, and the Daniel Cubiciotti Student Award of the Electrochemical Society. Dr. Tang completed postdoctoral work at Stanford University and research internships at Kyoto University, the University of Dortmund, and DuPont. She is the recipient of a 2018 NSF CAREER award, the 2019 College of Engineering Early Career Research Award, and a 2018 Award for Excellence in Peer Review from the ACS PRF. Her research at Drexel develops materials, architectures and fundamental insight for electrochemical energy storage and conversion.  

Presentation Abstarct:

In an energy future with increased environmental concerns and reduced availability of fossil fuels, electrochemical systems will play a major role in automotive and grid-storage applications. Our research aims to diagnose and overcome challenges related to electrochemical energy storage based on mechanistic analysis integrating theory and experiment. One example of these challenges relates to electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution and oxidation reactions (HER and HOR). The pH-dependence of HER and HOR kinetics remains a basic problem in modern electrochemistry. I will discuss our work to elucidate this paradox using single-crystal voltammetry, microkinetic modeling, and kinetic isotope effects. Contrary to some literature reports, acidic and basic HER/HOR do not follow different pathways, nor do the adsorption energies of the active intermediates change. Rather, the interfacial water dynamics are different in acid and base. Methods for quantifying these phenomena and implications of these findings for electrocatalyst design will be discussed.

Meeting Agenda:

6:30 PM - Zoom Meeting opens

6:45 PM - Section Announcements

7:00 PM - Technical Presentation

Questions? Please email us at contact@aichechicago.org