At ANEMEL, a wide range of scientific disciplines come together thanks to the diverse expertise of our researchers. In this new edition of #MeetOurPartners, we turn our attention to nanoscience and nanotechnology through the work of Joyal Johny.
Johny is part of the ANEMEL team at the Jožef Stefan Institute (JSI), in Slovenia, where he is a Young Researcher in the group of Suraj Gupta at the Department of Advanced Materials. He joined ANEMEL in February 2024, when he began his PhD at JSI, just on time to attend our annual meeting in Milan, Italy!
However, his journey into nanotechnology and hydrogen began much earlier in his career. “During my bachelor’s degree in chemistry, we had to study a specific paper on nanoscience. I became so interested in the field that I decided to pursue it for my master’s degree”, he explains. For his master’s project he worked on hydrogen production. “It was a random thing, but afterwards I decided that I wanted to continue working in this area. Hydrogen has a promising future, especially as fossil fuels are expected to decline over the coming decades,” he says.
Drawing on this expertise, Johny’s work within ANEMEL focuses on developing low-cost nanocatalysts for both the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). But rather than creating separate catalysts for each process, he develops bifunctional catalysts capable of driving both reactions.
To achieve this, our researcher combines the most promising elements for each reaction into a single catalyst. And when we say low-cost, we mean it. “We are mainly working with transition metal borides. We do not use any platinum-group metals,” he explains.
In many ways, this represents the ideal catalyst. However, achieving high performance without using platinum remains a significant challenge. To overcome this, Johny employs several strategies to improve catalytic activity, including doping, alloying and designing different nanostructures, and applying a range of thermal treatments.
But working at the nanoscale offers significant advantages when designing these catalysts, with particles around 20–30 nanometres in size. This nanoscale structure makes the catalyst highly active because reducing particle size increases the available surface area. As the surface area increases, catalytic activity rises dramatically.
“We can produce these materials in different ways and tune their structures and properties to optimise performance. In our case, spherical nanostructures comprising three transition-metals help improve both activity and stability”, he adds.
By alloying the most effective elements for HER and OER, Johny has developed a catalyst with excellent bifunctional activity. Moreover, it remains both active and stable in alkaline media as well as seawater. This makes it a perfect catalyst for seawater electrolysis.
Following this success, Johny’s work has moved towards upscaling his catalyst. The aim is to produce enough quantity for ANEMEL’s final demonstration test of operating a 1 kWe stack continuously for 2,000 hours. Whereas he initially prepared around 0.2 grams of catalyst, he now needs to produce approximately 15 grams while maintaining the same performance and properties. We are sure that he will rise to the challenge.