The first week of December was very significant for our A-LEAF project.

We went to Vienna to celebrate the 24 months milestone of the project with a very interesting meeting full of scientific discussions, exciting results and new ideas.

The meeting kicked off with a very warm welcome (in a very cold Vienna) from Prof. Ulrike Diebold (thanks for hosting!) followed by  presentations of the latest results delivered by PhD students and PostDocs from the 12 European academic institutions participating in A-LEAF. The active participation and engagement of our young researchers with A-LEAF is one of the most important assets of our project and we are very proud of them.

Then, we moved on to discuss about what is coming next: our very exciting near future.

The meeting was a huge success and, as Anthony Harriman – one of the members of A-LEAF Advisory Board – mentioned, we are seeing the first very promising results arising from collaborative efforts from the different institutions in the consortium. Now, it is time to really focus on exploiting these collaborations to achieve even greater results and to get closer to an efficient and economically viable device able to convert CO2 and water through in environmentally friendly solar fuels.

The meeting was followed by A-LEAF participation in ICT2018, an event that gathered more than 6000 visitors from 120 countries. Our FET project, some of our A-LEAF researchers and plenty of our science were present in booth C12. We enjoyed explaining the wonders of artificial photosynthesis, showing how we could transform solar energy into electricity able to run a mini-windfarm through water splitting and proudly exhibiting samples of A-LEAF designed photovoltaic cells and the first prototype idea of our final device. We would like to thank the organisers of ICT2018 and the European Commission for inviting us, our visitors (especial mention to Viorel Peca – Head of Unit  DG Connect –  who came to our stand to find out more about A-LEAF) and the A-LEAF members for sharing your enthusiasm for the project.

Next stop… the International Bunsen-Discussion Meeting in Taormina where we will share ideas on Fundamentals and Applications of (Photo)electrolysis for Efficient Energy Storage with two other European projects: SOLAR H2 (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft SPP 1613) and MANGAN (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung). We are looking forward to it!