Oxygen (O2) is a key molecule in hydrogen technology devices for energy production. The investigation of its interaction with the electrode surface can help one to better understand several reactions at the electrode-electrolyte interface. In electrocatalysis, oxygen is obtained by water splitting and it is essential for fuel cell operation. Therefore, the oxygen reduction (ORR) and oxygen evolution (OER) reactions are mostly studied due to the main role of fuel cell and water electrolyzer in the energy conversion and storage systems, respectively. To radically improve efficiency of these two reactions a new class of electrocatalysts based on transition metal nitrides has recently been introduced, but the synthesis of nanomaterials suitable for these applications is difficult using conventional chemical or plasma routes. The project aims at the design and synthesis, by laser ablative methods, of bare (ligand-free) nanoparticles of transition metal nitrides (TiN, ZrN, HfN) and the characterization of their electrochemical interface related to oxygen evolution and oxygen reduction reactions. It is expected that such nanostructured electrodes will much outperform the currently existing counterparts.

The EU member states have a challenging task to reduce 80-95% of the greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. In addition, the European as well as Global situation necessitates to change our attitude towards more sustainable and resource efficient consumption. The circular economy is the way to approach sustainable use of the natural resources without causing unnecessary pollution. These targets are related to the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. Bioenergy and more generally bioeconomy has a central role in reaching the EU's climate and energy targets. Increasing use of biomass for energy and fuels also raises a question related to the sustainable use of biomass. In May 2017 a report on sustainable and optimal use of biomass of energy in the EU beyond 2020 was published. It states several major considerations related to biomass use that could be at least partly overcome by using waste raw material. The report also states, that substantial growth of bioenergy from waste is possible. The European Union defines waste as an object the holder discards, intends to discard or is required to discard (European Directive (WFD) 2006/12/EC). Once a substance or an object has become waste, it will remain waste until it has been fully recovered and no longer poses a potential threat to the environment or to human health. In general, waste is a mixture of several components, only in some cases waste is pure and therefore a perfect subject for recycling and utilization. Thus specific procedures and low cost technologies are required in order to transform waste into useful products. This demand is the basis of the No-Waste 2 RISE project in which the wastes (specifically agriculture lignocellulosic wastes) will be transformed in two intermediate of utmost interest for catalysis: - porous carbon solids via hydrothermal carbonization (first research area) - syngas via production of biogas (second research area) The hydrothermal carbons will then be used as supports of catalysts and eletrocatalysts while syngas will be the bioresource for the generation of fuels or chemicals. A parallel research topic on the utilization of hydrothermal carbon as adsorbent for the water treatment is also considered. No Waste 2 which will be coordinated by Nicolas Bion, University of Poitiers, France is a continuation to the earlier project entitled “No-Waste: Utilization of Industrial By-products and Waste in Environmental Protection” (FP7-PEOPLE-PIRSES-2012-317714; https://cordis.europa.eu/result/rcn/202586_en.html) coordinated by University of Oulu between 2013 and 2017. In NO-WASTE 2, the project consortium has been reconsidered and new collaborations are foreseen to be established in line with the two areas of research of the proposal.

The Intermetalyst project aims to explore in details novel supported catalysts based on electride-like intermetallics RTX (R = rare-earth; T = transition metal; X = Si, Ge) to enhance the catalytic synthesis of ammonia and hence reduce its energy consumption. Electrides are crystals that contain excess electrons periodically located in crystallographic sites throughout the lattice. The ability of these RTX materials to transfer these electrons promotes the dissociation of an adsorbed molecule by weakening its chemical bond. This study is highly motivated by the discovery of the outstanding catalytic activity of the LaScSi silicide when combined with ruthenium. Besides, the very promising preliminary results obtained by the consortium for some other RTX intermetallics suggest that the LaScSi performances could be improved. The excellent catalytic activities of such type of materials are ascribed to their ability to supply electrons to Ru and absorb reversibly hydrogen in the working conditions of NH3 synthesis (N2+H2), preventing notably H poisoning of the Ru surface. Additionally, these materials are stable under ammonia synthesis conditions and do not necessitate high specific area. In this project divided in 5 Work Packages, we will synthesize these RTX intermetallics and determine their hydrogen sorption properties, as well as their electronic properties (including DFT calculations) and catalytic performances. The Intermetalyst project will be jointly led by experts of intermetallics and hydrides materials at ICMCB and specialists of catalysis at IC2MP. Finding stable non-toxic electrides materials, able to boost the Ru-based catalysis at ambient pressure as well as prevent the H poisoning of Ru, is a hot topic and will be a real breakthrough in the field of catalysis and sustainable chemistry.

The depletion of the fossil reserves and the global warming concern have boosted researches on the utilization of biomass as renewable raw material. Lignocellulosic biomass is mainly composed by 75% of carbohydrates along with lignin. Hence, many researches are devoted to the conversion of carbohydrates to value added molecules. Furanic compounds such as X-furfural (X = H, CH2OH, CH2OR ) can be produced via hydrolysis/dehydration reaction of carbohydrates (cellulose, hemicelluloses…). Among these furanic compounds, furfural is produced industrially (400 000 t/year) whereas 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) is produced only in a pilot scale plant. HMF has not emerged yet at an industrial level due to a lack of selectivity or eco-efficiency in the production/transformation of HMF. In this project, an innovative tool box will be created to access, directly from carbohydrates, to valuable and cost-efficient chemicals with improved properties. These chemicals will be produced via furfuraldehyde series, which will be in situ converted to the targeted products to by-pass the energy-consuming and costly processes generally required to isolate furfuraldehyde derivatives. Targeted molecules are already selected (aminoalkyl tetrahydrofuran, alkyltetrahydrofuran ketone, amidoalkyl tetrahydrofuran) according to their potential of market via predictive methods. In this reaction, a particular attention will be given to the nature of solid catalysts as well as the choice of the solvent to successfully and selectively perform the reaction in a one pot sequence. The life cycle assessments of the process/chemicals as well as the eco-evaluation of the process will be investigated. The final aim is to produce targeted molecules in one-pot from carbohydrates. This proposal is a public collaborative project between IC2MP (Institut de Chimie des Milieux et Matériaux de Poitiers), ICBMS (Institut de Chimie et Biochimie Moléculaires et Supramoléculaires) and E2P2L (Eco-Efficient Products and Processes Laboratory).

Underground systems remain often poorly known as regard flow and transport. The main reason is the under-sampled nature of underground reservoirs with the meaning that observations are limited to a few wells compared with the several km3 of host rocks. Even though the last two decades revealed fruitful to ground water modeling, the question of model inversion is still teasing. To make it short, pinpoint fitting of a model onto scarce data never ensures that the model is predictive: 1- several solutions may exist to the same problem, 2- the model sensitivity to parameters is usually "local", i.e., calculated in the close vicinity of an optimal solution. What if this solution is wrong and the behavior of the system ignored for a wide range of reasonably acceptable parameters? A recent example grounded on intensive studies of the limestone aquifer at the Hydrogeological Experimental Site - Poitiers (HES – National Observatory Tasks appointed by CNRS – France) showed that complex channeled flow and transport could be approached by several mechanistic models. Automatic inversions of these models pointed out that a local sensitivity analysis was unable to distinguish solutions with physical meaning from that with awkward parameter values. Notably, several conceptualizations of flow and transport also returned solutions for which the modeler was unable to rank one as better than the other. Thus, there is a crux need for handling uncertainty/sensitivity analysis and inverse problems differently. The RESAIN project is aimed at developing a methodology to address these topics in a "global" manner for both complex flow and transport conditioned onto real data, presently that from the HES-Poitiers. The global analysis is assumed to inform on the model behavior for wide ranges of parameter values and is a priori disconnected from any specific fitting of a given problem. This analysis will be based on meta-models, i.e., surrogates of the initial model with the same physical-numerical behavior and the same parameterization but easier to compute. These meta-models will be inferred as Polynomial Chaos Expansions (PCE) allowing the influence of a single parameter, or any n-uplet to be lumped onto pre-fixed bases of orthogonal polynomials. The PCE can be performed following either the so-called non-intrusive or intrusive methods. The non intrusive form is based on a Monte-Carlo training of the PCE over equiprobable realizations of the initial model while making to vary the parameters over wide ranges. The Intrusive form embeds the polynomial forms directly into the partial differential equations representing the model. Both approaches will be undertaken for both deterministic and stochastic parameterizations. The stochastic parameterization of a spatially distributed model will be handled by the Karhunen-Loève decomposition. The latter allows replacing a cumbersome parameterization (e.g., a random value at each cell discritizing the Euclidean space) by a vector of scalars of limited size. All meta-models will be trained on initial models that proved their worth for complex flow and transport. These models are based on dual-continua that can be degraded at will according to the prevailing mechanisms. By comparing sensitivity/uncertainty analysis between PCE's of these different models, the conditions making a mechanism dominant will be assessed as well as the potential information on this mechanism enclosed in data. Then, a series of meta-model inversions will be performed on the HES data. It is expected that the good knowledge of the model and its global sensitivity will speed up the inversion procedure and moderate wanderings in the parameter space by seeking unphysical solutions. Because the initial models are general and versatile, it is obvious that RESAIN will yield a methodology not only applicable to the specific case of the HES but also affordable and applicable to much wider contexts.