Engineering Porous Electrode Materials Across Length Scales
Guest Speaker：Prof. Antoni Forner-Cuenca, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
Inviter: Prof. Tao Liu
Date&Time: Wednesday, 22nd Jul. 10:00-11:30
Venue: Yiucheng Lecture Hall(500), Xu Zuyao Building
Biography:
Prof. Antoni Forner-Cuenca is a Full Professor of Electrochemical Materials and Systems and Vice Dean of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at Eindhoven University of Technology. He received his degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Alicante in 2013 and completed his PhD at the Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zurich in 2016. During his doctoral research, he pioneered gas diffusion layers with patterned wettability for polymer electrolyte fuel cells. His PhD work was recognized with the ETH Zurich Medal for an outstanding doctoral thesis and the Electrochemical Society Energy Technology Graduate Student Award.
From 2017 to 2018, he conducted postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focusing on redox flow batteries for large-scale energy storage. In 2019, he joined Eindhoven University of Technology and established the Electrochemical Materials and Systems Group. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2023 and Full Professor in 2025.
His research integrates electrochemical engineering, materials science, and physical chemistry to design, synthesize, characterize, and model advanced electrode materials and electrochemical reactors. His main research interests include porous electrode engineering, redox flow batteries, polymer electrolyte fuel cells, electrolyzers, electrochemical separations, and sustainable molecular synthesis. He has received several major honors, including an ERC Starting Grant, NWO Veni and Vidi Grants, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Early Career Award, the Hydrogen Europe Young Scientist Award, and the Electrochemical Society Energy Technology Division Supramaniam Srinivasan Early Career Award.
Abstract:
Carbonaceous porous electrodes are essential components in electrochemical energy technologies such as redox flow batteries, fuel cells, and metal–air batteries. Their three-dimensional microstructure—including porosity, surface area, pore-size distribution, and pore connectivity—and their surface chemistry—including functional groups, wettability, charge density, and polarity—strongly influence electrochemical performance, durability, and system efficiency.
This talk will discuss the engineering of porous electrode materials across multiple length scales, with particular emphasis on the different electrode requirements of single-phase systems, such as redox flow batteries, and multiphase systems, such as polymer electrolyte fuel cells. First, computational approaches for the rational design of flow-battery electrodes will be introduced, together with scalable fabrication strategies for producing carbonaceous electrodes with tailored microstructures. Second, the talk will demonstrate how chemical grafting, electrografting, and electropolymerization can be used to regulate electrode surface chemistry, thereby controlling wettability, reaction kinetics, and selectivity. Finally, the lecture will examine catalyst layers in polymer electrolyte fuel cells and explain how the interaction between support microstructure and surface chemistry governs proton transport, mass transfer, and overall cell performance. These examples highlight the importance of jointly optimizing pore architecture and interfacial chemistry when designing high-performance electrochemical devices.