Michael Poschmann Email & Phone Number

To overcome the recent problems concerning energy and environmental issues, renewable energies with lowest environmental impact are most important. Hydrogen produced via water splitting is a key technique to make very important industrial processes, transportation and shipping environmental friendly. While the widely discussed battery applications bear the issues of specific capacity limits and elemental abundancy, hydrogen is omnipresent and very flexible in usage. Unlike batteries, it is directly usable for chemical reactions. But hydrogen has the disadvantage of low energy density when stored as pressurized gas and its not easy to handle as liquid. One option is to store the hydrogen chemically bonded in ammonia. The advantage: ammonia is anyway produced and transported on mega scale and the catalytic production is very efficient. But research is still needed for an efficient ammonia decomposition. Here my work starts as member of the BMBF funded AmmoRef project within the lead project TransHyDe and the German hydrogen strategy. My task is to synthesize and characterize carbon supported 3d metal catalysts for the ammonia decomposition. During my masters thesis, PhD and post doctoral work, I focused on photocatalytic proton reduction. This technique combines catalysts with semiconducting materials to be used ideally for direct conversion of solar energy to produce hydrogen from water. The possibly most investigated material is palladium or platinum on titanium dioxide. Although it is almost inactive when being irradiated with visible light and contains precious metals. My research covered as well the research finding an adequate replacement for titanium dioxide and palladium/platinum. The research concerning this topic covers a lot of analytics, e. g. UV/Vis-spectroscopy, physisorption, electron microscopy, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, total scattering and in my case especially X-Ray diffraction combined with deep going Rietveld analysis and whole powder pattern modelling. And it requires a lot of knowledge in semiconductor physics, crystallography, catalysis, interfacial chemistry and on nano materials synthesis and characterization.My motivation: Usage of this knowledge and abilities for practical solutions