efore he began grad school, Staff Sheehan had already started two technology companies using programming skills he taught himself as a teenager. So it’s not a surprise that Sheehan, now 28, is using his academic training in electrochemistry as an entrepreneur. Sheehan has selected an audacious target for his start-up, Catalytic Innovations. He is building an electrochemical cell to make fuels and chemicals using only water, carbon dioxide, and energy from the sun. Although some so-called solar fuel devices have shown promise in the lab, the idea has proved difficult to commercialize. If he manages to make it work, Sheehan would be making good on a vague ambition that has stuck with him since high school. “I was studying climate change and decided I wanted to make a ‘box’ to solve the problem,” Sheehan says. He has been steadily making progress toward a climate-friendly device that transforms water and CO2 ever since. As a freshman at Boston College, Sheehan quickly got to work in Dunwei Wang’s lab, where he researched new materials for energy conversion and storage. He continued to build his energy knowledge while a graduate student in Charles Schmuttenmaer’s group at Yale University. While in grad school, Sheehan first made gold-coated nanoparticles to improve the performance of dye-sensitized solar cells, then moved on to artificial photosynthesis, which called for making new catalysts. Catalysts are the secret sauce of an efficient solar fuel cell. They help break the molecular bonds of water and CO2 and reassemble the atoms into useful fuels and chemicals, such as ethanol. At Yale, Sheehan developed water-splitting catalysts with chemistry professor and to make fuel Sheehan is harnessing energy from the sun electrons generated by Gary Brudvig and Paul Anastas, ▸ CURRENT uses electrochemical cell director of Yale’s Center for AFFILIATION: Catalytic other chemicals. His lysts solar cells plus two types of cata Green Chemistry & Green that Innovations tions reac ical to power dual chem Engineering. ▸ AGE: 28 nol. etha fuel the produce Catalyst-driven electro▸ PH.D. ALMA MATER: chemistry is also used in metal e– Yale University refining and petrochemical ▸ ADVICE FOR YOUNG Solar energy production. So Sheehan sumSCIENTISTS: “Perform moned his Yale training to help your experiments soundly, – 2CO2 + 12H+ + 12e Catalytic Innovations make and collect reproducible Fuel CH3CH2OH catalysts for industry. The data. Nobody is right all the CO2 CH3CH2OH + 3H2O firm sells its iridium catalysts time, but well-collected Reduction catalyst through Strem Chemicals. data is always an asset.” Cathode Anastas has joined Sheehan ▸ IF I WERE AN BE: ULD WO at the start-up. “It is in Staff ’s I T, MEN ELE 2H2O veins to take science and turn Iridium. “It’s extremely O2 it into commercial reality,” resilient and tough to H2O O2 + 4H+ + 4e– Anastas says. “He’s really corrode, yet versatile in Oxidation catalyst just that good.”—MELODY that it can access 12
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different oxidation states under the right conditions.”
RESEARCH AT A GLANCE
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Solar fuel electrolyzer
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