Summary

Energy crisis and resultant environmental pollution continues to be a major hindrance to the development of African countries thus, this research focuses mainly on providing an alternative source of fuel apart from the conventional fossil fuel. Dr Hafeez proposes solar fuel (Hydrogen) generation via water-splitting as an ideal future fuel. Dr. Hafeez’s research will generate energy via simple materials including photocatalyst, water and solar light.

Grantee Description

Dr. Hafeez Yusuf Hafeez is an experienced researcher and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Physics, Federal University Dutse, Jigawa state, Nigeria. He obtained his PhD in Nanoscience from SRM Institute of Science and Technology, India in 2018 and his doctoral work focused on the Design and development of solar-light driven organic/inorganic hybrid materials (especially metals, metal-oxide based catalysts) for photocatalytic solar fuel (Hydrogen) production.

Dr Hafeez’s long term aspiration is to become a research Professor at Federal University Dutse with a well-established laboratory that will train many researchers. He is highly interested in research, especially catalyst design for solar-driven water splitting, photoelectrochemical applications and other related fields. He expects to publish results from this project in high-impact journals. He also aims at publishing articles for science dissemination and participate in international conferences to exchange knowledge and to develop national and international collaboration. He aspires to create a large community of researchers in my area of research in Europe and the world at large.

Project: Development of Efficient and Robust Mxene Based Photocatalysts for Production of Solar Fuel (Hydrogen) via Photocatalytic Water Splitting

Advancing high-performance, inexpensive photocatalysts for solar fuel production is an urgent goal. MXene supported heterojunction photocatalysts (MHPs) are a promising class of emerging materials, however the current limitation of MHPs remains as poor charge separation efficiency, resulting in low photocatalytic activity. Herein, we will design and develop novel MHPs by several methods including, hydrothermal, precipitation, ultrasonic, and wet impregnation, for efficient solar-driven photocatalytic H2 production. The prepared photocatalysts will be characterized by standard techniques (such as XRD, Raman, FTIR, XPS, SEM, TEM, BET, PL spectra, UV-vis DRS spectra) and optimized for H2 production. In parallel, model systems of the MHPs, prepared as thin film photoelectrodes will be scrutinized with perturbation electrochemical techniques in order to gain deep insight into the charge carrier dynamics and direct the improvement of the MHPs. This synergy will enable significant advance in the maximum H2 production activity and Solar-to- Hydrogen (STH) efficiency.

Moreover, most of the photocatalytic activities are performed using fluorescent lamp, which could only provide opportunities for photocatalysis application in an indoor environment. Whereas the method to be adopted in this research will give access to proper utilization of the solar light in the photocatalytic activity that could be beneficial to our continent and country (Nigeria), as Nigeria is an equatorial climate country where abundant and clean solar energy is available for water splitting to produce hydrogen. Thus, this project will establish that coupling MXene with semiconductor heterojunction materials can open a new approach to fabricate inexpensive and noble-metal-free materials for sustainable solar fuel (Hydrogen) production.