The 11th “Madrid is Science” Fair, organised by the Fundación para el Conocimiento madri+d, has registered a number of visitors in excess of 20,000 people, thus surpassing the number of visitors to its last edition (2019).

During its four days from 2 to 5 March, Hall 14 of the IFEMA Madrid exhibition centre turned its 3,000 metres into a comprehensive exhibition of the Region of Madrid’s R&D&I capabilities for the construction of a sustainable future, showing citizens, from a fun and participatory point of view, the response that Science, Technology and Innovation can give to the challenges facing the planet.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the celebration of the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development have been the backbone of this edition, which has had the slogan “Building a sustainable future” and around which the different activities that have taken place at the Fair have revolved. Thus, visitors were able to participate in experiments carried out by more than 1,200 students from the 41 participating schools; witness demonstrations by young researchers who carry out their scientific work at leading centres in the Community of Madrid, such as the IMDEA Madrid Institutes for Advanced Studies.

In the case of IMDEA Energía, the activities took place on 2 and 3 March. On the first day, scientists from the Systems Analysis and Thermochemical Processes Unit carried out a quiz for the participants, while several researchers from the Photoactivated Processes and Advanced Porous Materials units developed the workshop ‘Game of Pores: what do coal and a sponge have in common’, as an example of water decontamination.

On Thursday 3 it was the turn of researchers from the High Temperature Unit, who demonstrated the operation of a stirling engine and the capacity of a small-scale solar concentrator, and from the Electochemical Processes Unit, who taught attendees how to make their own button cell battery or to better understand the process of water electrolysis and the Nernst equation.

Institute IMDEA Energy has reached 1000 publications in the SCOPUS database, with a total of 162 registered authors.

Of the total number of publications, 425 belong to the ‘Energy’ branch, 350 to ‘Chemistry’, 298 to ‘Chemical Engineering’, 278 to ‘Engineering’, 220 to ‘Environmental Sciences’, 202 to ‘Materials Science’, 107 to ‘Physics and Astronomy’, 66 to ‘Biochemistry and Genetics’, 43 to ‘Mathematics’, 35 to ‘Computer Science’ and the rest are distributed to a lesser extent in categories such as Business Management, Immunology, Agriculture, Pharmacology, Medicine or Neuroscience.

In addition, according to the SCIVAL index, IMDEA Energy has 83 percent of publications in journals in the first quartile, 61 percent of articles in journals in the first decile, 48 percent in international collaborations and a normalized citation impact factor of 1.77.

In 2020 Institute IMDEA Energy obtained accreditation as a “María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence” granted by the Ministry of Science and Innovation through the State Research Agency for the period 2020-2023. The Severo Ochoa / María de Maeztu program identifies and promotes high-impact research carried out in R&D centers in our country. This accreditation is recognition of IMDEA Energy’s track record of excellence and of its human team, making it the first center to obtain this accreditation in the energy sector as a whole.

During these last two years, and in spite of the limitations and difficulties derived from the pandemic, IMDEA Energy has continued to make progress to position itself as a world reference in its field. The research activities developed in the context of the Maria de Maeztu program have focused on three topics of strategic interest to achieve the decarbonization of the transport sector: new concepts of electromobility, solar fuels and hydrogen, and fourth generation fuels, i.e. those coming from waste and residues.

In this context, IMDEA Energy has increased its staff by 25% in two years, reaching a total of 132 employees by the end of 2021. Likewise, 66 students have collaborated with the Institute, carrying out their final degree and master’s degree projects, as well as internships in companies, and a total of 50 visiting researchers have been received.

On the other hand, a total of 236 scientific publications have been indexed in the period 2020-2021, with a percentage of 88% in journals with impact factors in the first quartile and 53% of publications in international collaboration. In addition, 13 doctoral theses have been read and eight patent applications have been filed in the last two years.

In terms of fundraising for the development of R&D activities, a record number was reached in 2021, with 93 active projects and contracts, 50% more than in 2018, which represented a 30% increase in external funding. In addition, a total of 73 projects were initiated in 2020-2021, almost 24% more than in the previous biennium. Among the projects underway in 2021, 22 are international projects and, of these, 7 are coordinated by IMDEA Energy and 4 correspond to prestigious grants awarded by the European Research Council (ERC).

Another milestone to highlight has been the award in 2021 of the HRS4R Seal of Excellence in Human Resources in Research by the European Commission, which distinguishes the work of the center in adopting good practices in terms of recruitment, career development and working conditions of researchers, contributing to the generation of an attractive and stimulating European labor market for scientists, in line with the European Charter and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers.

Finally, the accreditation as a Maria de Maeztu Unit of Excellence has strengthened IMDEA Energy’s scientific and technical capabilities and reinforced its technology transfer activities, as well as its science dissemination and communication activities.

The growing global demand for energy is contributing to a relentless increase in carbon dioxide emissions. Finding economical and fossil-free ways to supply energy has become one of the major challenges of this century.

In this context, ammonia is postulated as an emission-free fertilizer, fuel and energy store, with a potential key role in the transition towards a sustainable economy.

The DEMONIA project awarded to IMDEA Energy seeks to address these challenges by developing a scalable and environmentally friendly photoelectrocatalytic device for the production of solar ammonia.

To do so, researchers at the institute will use a new generation of hybrid heterostructures based on Conjugated Porous Polymers, which have not been studied for ammonia production until now. These materials are expected to outperform conventional photoelectrodes, leading to a higher conversion of nitrogen to ammonia.

Thus, the project, which has a duration of 18 months, will evaluate the feasibility of this novel photoelectrochemical approach for the generation of solar ammonia with the aim of accelerating the development of this technology for its access to the market in the near future, in sectors such as agriculture, transportation, chemical or pharmaceutical industry.

DEMONIA is a Proof of Concept (PoC) grant from the European Research Council (ERC).

The water-energy nexus is one of the topics that has gained prominence in the last decade. Recently, the scope of this term has been extended beyond production to the storage level. This new way of understanding the relationship includes, for example, the search for synergies between the area of electrochemical energy storage devices (such as batteries and supercapacitors) and the field of water treatment, desalination or effluent decontamination.

The objective is to take advantage of the knowledge achieved in the field of energy storage to develop water treatment and ion or pollutant capture processes with higher energy efficiency. Thus, enhancing the manners of obtaining drinking water in a world scenario marked by drought and by the search for alternatives that contribute to face the climate challenge.

In this context, researchers at IMDEA Energy’s Electrochemical Processes Unit have taken a step further by taking advantage of the structural advantages of vanadium flow batteries (VRFB), which are characterized by their larger storage capacity, to improve the energy efficiency of the capacitive deionization technology (CDI).

CDI is a technology capable of reducing the ion content in solution while storing part of the energy consumed in the process. This is possible because this treatment operates in the same way as supercapacitors. Thus, in the CDI charging cycle, ions are captured producing a solution with lower ionic content and energy is stored, while in the discharge cycle the captured ions are released forming a brine and part of the energy is recovered.

The studies, recently published in the Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering, show the transition from a 5 kWh VRFB to a 5-cell CDI stack equipped with 3D electrodes with one of the largest working areas reported to date, 1200 cm2. This transition allows taking advantage of critical aspects of the VRFB such as its design and assembly of the different elements, its electrical configuration using bipolar plates, or the use of optimized flow distributors to avoid energy losses.

The results show that the process of reconditioning the VRFB to be used as a CDI reactor is a success both in terms of performance, with a high desalination capacity, and in terms of energy consumption, allowing a recovery of 75% of the energy used in the desalination cycle, and robustness, as it manages to complete nearly 500 cycles, which is equivalent to almost one month of operation.

This opens up a new path within the framework of the circular economy to give a second life to the industrial vanadium flow batteries that have been introduced on the market in recent years.

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“A successful transition from a vanadium redox flow battery stack to an energy efficient electrochemical desalination module”

Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering

JJ Lado, E García-Quismondo, I Almonacid, G García, G Castro, J Palma

Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering 9 (6), 106875

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jece.2021.106875

The generation of green fuels such as hydrogen is nowadays a fundamental research topic associated with the growing energy demand. Photocatalysis, a photochemical reaction that converts solar energy into chemical energy on the surface of a catalyst, appears as a challenging way to produce H2 from water alone.

In this context, IMDEA Energy Institute has successfully synthesized and characterized a new photocatalyst material capable of producing record amounts of hydrogen for the generation of solar fuels.

This new materials is aporous metal-organic framework (MOF) based on the titanium(IV), called IEF-11 (IEF stands for IMDEA Energy Framework). This material achieves the best overall water splitting performances reported so far for MOFs in absence of any sacrificial agent or co-catalysts, and is able to maintain its activity after more than ten cycles.

The material was prepared by heating a mixture of dispersed precursors in a solvent in a closed reactor using a high-throughput method. Due to its nanometric nature, its structure has been unveiled by combining unconventional techniques; specifically, the determination of the crystal structure has been possible using the three dimensional electron diffraction (3DED) technique and the synchrotron X ray diffraction (PDRX). Furthermore, its extraordinary structural and chemical stability under a wide variety of aggressive conditions (pH, organic solvents and irradiation) has been demonstrated.

Considering the versatility of the IEF-11 design, it could serve as a leading structure for the development of a series of Ti-MOFs and for obtaining a new generation of efficient solar photocatalysts.

In the transportation sector, biofuels have driven the transition from an oil-dependent model towards a renewable scenario. Among biofuels, there are lipid-derived fuels like biodiesel based on vegetable oils. To cover biofuel production needs, a strong demand of plant oils is expected in the coming years. To solve this, microbial oils are envisaged as promising alternatives to meet this growing necessity. In this manner, oil-based chemistry arises as a promising alternative to petroleum for the production of sustainable fuels and chemicals.

The Biotechnological Processes Unit of IMDEA Energy coordinates the project Biowaste conversion to microbial oils for fuel production (BIOMIO). In this project, carried out together with some researchers from CIEMAT, agri-food organic residues are used to produce two different carbon sources (carboxylates and sugars) that are converted into oils by yeast and subsequently transformed into biofuels. This project also explores the production of additional co-products (biohydrogen and carotenoids) that would help improving the overall efficiency of the processes.

There is no doubt of the need of shift to a bio-based economy to counteract over-dependency of fossil fuels, reduce GHG emissions, and develop environmentally friendly and sustainable global economies. Thus, BIOMIO has been designed to reduce GHG emissions in a circular economy context based on the sustainable use of available resources.

Project PID2020-119403RB-C21 funded by: