ANR SOLAR Fuel - english
SOLAR-Fuel Project
Design of new materials for SOLAR fuel production from machine learning and DFT calculations
March 2026 – March 2030
Coordinator Laboratory of the project: Unité de Catalyse et de Chimie du Solide (UCCS), Lille
Coordinator of the project: Adlane SAVEDE (Professor Université d’Artois)
IMN Coordinator of the project: Houria KABBOUR DR CNRS (team MIOPS)
Partners :
Unité de Catalyse et de Chimie du Solide (UCCS, Lille)
IFP Energies Nouvelles (IFPEN)
Persons of IMN involved:
Romain GAUTIER (CR CNRS, team MIOPS)
David BERTHEBAUD (CR CNRS, team MIOPS)
Shunsuke SASAKI (CR CNRS, team PMN)
Total Financing : 517 786 € with 201 212 € for IMN
In the current project, we propose to design new materials for solar fuel production. In particular, we are interested in finding new chemical compositions with stable crystal structures and desired band gaps to improve the conversion of CO2 to CH4 and H2O to H2.
To this end, a new machine learning (ML) model developed by one of the project partners will be used. The training set will use high quality public data from the materialproject.org.
Once the desired structures are identified thanks to their optoelectronic properties and their stability confirmed by DFT, they will be synthesised, characterised and tested in photoelectrocatalysis of water and in CO2 photoconversion. We will focus on the generation of novel materials from the family of heteroanionic photocatalysts, such as metal oxysulphides (MxOySz) and oxyhalides (MOX)