People

Ella Fidment

Ella is a second year PhD student part of the ReNU CDT, her project is titled 'Optimising Electrocatalytic System for Multi-carbon Products for CO2 electrochemical reduction'. The opportunity with this technology is to generate chemical feedstocks from CO2 using renewable energy, enabling the conversion of electrical to chemical energy and offering a method of energy storage. Current barriers to the realisation of electrochemical reduction of CO2 are high energy inefficiency, low selectivity and competition with H2 evolution. With regards to selectivity, desirable multi-carbon products, such as ethylene and ethanol, are harder to evolve due to the high energy requirement of the C-C coupling reaction in comparison to single carbon products. Initially, her research investigates the use of sequential catalysis in the form of binary/ternary metal/ metal oxide-based catalyst to favour C2 products to run at lower potentials.