Last week, the ANEMEL team was in Ljubljana, Slovenia, to attend our already seventh Plenary Meeting. During the 4th and 5th of November, we had the opportunity to share our results from the past few months and to draw inspiration from our colleagues. We had plenty to share since our last meeting in Galway, Ireland, in April! This gathering would not have been possible without the efforts of our partner, the Jožef Stefan Institute (JSI), who hosted us in their beautiful city.
As always, we were eager to see each other again and were looking forward to our two days of work ahead. Although we meet online regularly, ideas do not flow in quite the same way. By presenting our results in front of our colleagues, we gain an excellent opportunity to share achievements and questions, and to receive support and valuable feedback from them.
However, not everyone from the project was able to make it to Ljubljana in person. Some of us joined the meeting online. That didn’t stop them from actively contributing to the discussions and giving presentations.
After all the hard work, we certainly deserved a reward and the JSI had prepared a surprise for us: a visit to the Postojna cave. It was chilli inside, only 10ºC, but an astonishing place with 24 of underground passages, galleries and halls carved by the Pivka River over millions of years.
An exciting lecture series on hydrogen technologies
A very special lecture session took place also that week. As many experts in green hydrogen were in Ljubljana, our ANEMEL team 😉, we organised a side symposium of open lectures on this topic. The session took place on Monday, 3rd November, under the title “Innovations in green hydrogen technologies”. The event was held in person at the Main Lecture Hall of JSI and was also streamed online. This special session was co-organised and hosted by our researcher Suraj Gupta, from the Advanced Materials Department at JSI, as part of an annual multi-speaker webinar initiative launched last year.
The lectures featured several ANEMEL group leaders. Xile Hu, from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland, was the first to present after Gupta’s welcome. Hu joined us remotely to explain the importance of membranes in electrolysis, particularly in anion exchange membrane technologies.
Our project coordinator, Pau Farrás, from The University of Galway, in Ireland, presented the FlowPhotoChem project, which worked to convert CO₂ and sunlight directly into clean fuels such as ethylene.
After hearing from researchers and start-ups, it was the turn of our industrial partner De Nora, in Italy, which has worked in the fabrication of electrodes for different applications for over a century. ANEMEL researcher Anna Ramunni was responsible for presenting all the details of their work.
Our group leader Fabio Dionigi, from TU Berlin, in Germany, then took the floor to discuss the key role that hydrogen plays in the green transition, particularly in replacing fossil fuels with clean and efficient energy carriers.
The session also benefited from the expertise of the invited speaker Nina Meglič, who presented ReCatalyst, a Slovenian start-up whose work on hydrogen fuel cells is recognised worldwide. Meglič and Farràs also introduced MarketHy, a unique booster project funded by the European Innovation Council (EIC) to foster collaboration between EIC initiatives.
If you’d like to know more about the talks, you can check out our Twitter thread on the event here. The lectures will soon be available on the ANEMEL YouTube channel.