Inventing energy technology for a sustainable future

On the third floor of the Climate Challenge Laboratory sits Tejs Vegge. He is a professor at DTU and heads the Pioneer Centre CAPeX (see fact box), which is one of Denmark's largest investments in material development for Power-2-X. In collaboration with Aalborg University and a number of Danish and international partners, Tejs Vegge will develop new materials for the green transition. The centre produces and manages enormous amounts of data on new energy materials. Every second, computer modelling and machine learning algorithms in CAPeX deliver the best suggestions for new materials. Automated synthesis robots then perform complex chemical reactions at a similarly fast pace, with high precision and efficiency.

The data on which CAPeX's algorithms and models are trained was developed by Professor Jens Kehlet Nørskov and his centre CATTHEORY on the 5th floor of the building. Jens Kehlet Nørskov is internationally recognized for his research in sustainable energy and catalysis, which is a process where a solid or liquid substance is used to increase the speed of chemical reactions. Among other things, he has developed quantum computational methods on supercomputers to simulate the processes and developed methods that can be used to design new catalytic materials.

Tejs Vegge explains that without Jens Kehlet Nørskov's discoveries and models, it would not have been possible to propose new materials at such a rapid pace.

"Today, we can use artificial intelligence to see patterns in data and to create lightning-fast models that can be used to suggest new material compositions that go beyond the data the models are built on. This has not been possible before. We didn't have the hardware to handle such large amounts of data, computing power and models that can think outside the box. Now you can, and this enables the models to suggest completely new materials themselves," says Tejs Vegge.

Working in a protected atmosphere

On the ground floor, researchers in the E-MAT research facility (see fact box) are ready to continue working with the materials and investigate them in a closed circuit - a kind of combined incubator and materials factory.

The materials are placed in a protected environment in an atmosphere where oxygen is replaced by argon gas instead of air - a so-called inert atmosphere where chemical reactions can be carefully controlled without the influence of oxygen or other gases. The facility is the first of its kind in Northern Europe and consists of 15 interconnected glove boxes containing a cluster of essential equipment. These include state-of-the-art methods that enable the surfaces and interfaces of materials to be checked on an atomic scale and ensure safe handling of delicate materials.

Professor Nini Pryds, who heads E-MAT, explains that the facility offers the opportunity to study new energy materials from the atomic to the macroscopic level, i.e. materials that researchers can hold in their hands and look at. He believes that research in the protected environment is crucial if research is to break new ground and discover new energy materials and possibilities that are not known today.

"The task is to think outside the box and invent new concepts for design materials. We won't solve the climate crisis and deliver the energy solutions of the future if we continue to do more of the same. We need to think of solutions we don't know today," says Nini Pryds.

The magic wand of chemistry

In the basement of the Climate Challenge Laboratory, researchers can examine and analyze the structure and properties of materials at the atomic level in an electron microscope in the VISION Center of Excellence. The analyses will shed light on how the atoms are arranged in the material and how this structure affects the catalytic properties of the material.

The VISION microscope is what the researchers call ‘one-of-a-kind’ - the only electron microscope in the world that excels at visualizing catalysts accelerating chemical processes in such high resolution. A unique research facility that has been made possible by the largest single grant from the Danish National Research Foundation of DKK 85.8 million to date, explains Professor Stig Helveg, who heads VISION.

"We are asking fundamental questions about chemical conditions. We are interested in investigating to understand catalysis at the atomic level, and this creates knowledge that can be utilized in the development of new materials and catalysts. However, our ultimate goal is to see a chemical reaction atom by atom as it happens," he says.

Almost all the research groups in the Climate Challenge Laboratory are investigating different aspects of catalysis, which Stig Helveg calls the magic wand of chemistry, and although there are differences in the objectives of the individual projects, they are necessary and productive opposites, according to Stig Helveg.

"The tension between people with different backgrounds and ideas means that they graft on each other's interests and challenge each other. And this is crucial to accelerate the development of new materials," he says.

"Each environment has its strengths, but in this building, we have a strength in a shared fundamental atomic scale understanding of catalysis and that binds us together. It makes the environment unique that we have a common language, so we can stand in the canteen and talk about the latest discoveries and jointly agree on what it would be exciting to place the atoms on in a catalyst. That's the kind of conversations we have," says Stig Helveg.

Materials research in the Climate Challenge Laboratory goes beyond the individual research area, the individual expert, and in the case of DTU - also beyond the capacity of the individual university. In Denmark, the University of Copenhagen, Aalborg University, Aarhus University and SDU are part of the collaboration around the Pioneer Centre, and on the international stage, the partners are Stanford University, Utrecht University and the University of Toronto.

The common condition for the researchers is that it takes an average of about 20 years to develop new materials for the green transition. And there is no time for that if the countries of the world are to develop a new sustainable energy supply that makes it possible to meet the UN's goal of reducing CO₂ emissions by 90 per cent by 2040.

"We don't have 20 years, we have five, so we need completely new methods and forms of collaboration like those we are trying to create in the Climate Challenge Laboratory and the Pioneer Centre," says Tejs Vegge.