To give the students the scientific background for Solar Fuels production with special emphasis on the catalytic materials required for this

• Motivate doing research in Catalysis for Sustainable Energy. This includes knowledge of Global Warming, The Energy Challenge, Sustainable Energy sources and their potential, and Energy Storage possibilities
• Understand how electronic structure theory can be used to understand the properties of materials and how this insight can be used to design new functional nanostructures.
• Know how microcopy and spectroscopy can be used to characterize nano materials at the atomic scale.
• Understand basic electro catalysis and how it potentially can be used to produce Solar fuels in electrolyzers
• Understand photo electro catalysis and the basic materials requirements when used for fuels production.
• Demonstrate basic knowledge about biomass and how it can be transformed into fuels.
• Evaluate the content of articles handed out prior to the lectures.
• Write a scientific text that is suitable for publishing in a webbook about Catalysis for Sustainable Energy or design an experiment that can be used for teaching Catalysis for Sustainable Energy.
• Orally present and defend the webbook text or the student experiment.

The content of the course will cover the background for the research initiative “Catalysis for Sustainable Energy” which is running at DTU in the period 2009 – 2014. This involves an introduction to the scientific methodology that will be used to design new catalytic nano materials. A methodology that envisions materials design through a combination of theoretical materials investigations, materials synthesis, materials characterization, and materials testing. Furthermore an introduction to the three catalytic routes to solar fuels will be given: Direct fuels synthesis by photo electro catalysis, conversion of sustainable electrical energy to fuel using electro catalysis and transformation for biomass to fuels.
The final evaluation of the course will consist of making a contribution for a webbook related to Catalysis for Sustainable Energy. This text must then be presented and defended in plenum by an oral presentation by each student