2026 ECS Texas Section Symposium

Water is rarely the most efficient molecule to electrolyze for hydrogen. For two decades my group has pursued unconventional electrolysis of waste and low-value streams: ammonia, urea, sewage sludge, and coal. Their potentials lie far below water splitting, so hydrogen costs a fraction of the electrical energy while the anode remediates a pollutant, recovers a nutrient, or valorizes a carbon resource: hydrogen as one product of a circular process, not the sole objective.

The first stream is ammonia, which dominates the lecture: a carbon-free carrier and pervasive wastewater contaminant. Its theoretical potential is twenty five times lower than water electrolysis, but demands control of the ammonia oxidation reaction - from mechanism to a 3,000 cm2 bipolar electrolyzer near net energy-positive operation. Nickel-catalyzed urea electrolysis turns human and animal waste into hydrogen and clean water.

The second stream is coal: electrolysis gives pure hydrogen and a modified carbon for fuels, nanomaterials, and rare earth recovery. Both converge in CASFER, our NSF Engineering Research Center developing modular, electrified technologies for a nitrogen circular economy across energy, water, and food.

The transition toward sustainable and decentralized water treatment requires technologies that can achieve efficient contaminant removal while minimizing chemical consumption, energy demand, and secondary waste generation. Electrochemical processes offer a unique opportunity in this regard because they can generate reactive species, drive selective transformations, and recover valuable resources directly from water using electrons as the primary reagent. However, translating electrochemical chemistry into practical water treatment requires simultaneous control of electrode materials, reaction pathways, mass transport, and reactor architecture.

In this presentation, we will discuss recent advances from our research group in the development of electrochemical technologies for water treatment including nitrate reduction and other advanced applications in gas-starving systems. Particular emphasis will be placed on the engineering of electrode-water interfaces and electrochemical reactors to control selectivity and treatment performance. We will also discuss emerging approaches that couple electrochemical processes with gas-liquid interfaces and nanobubbles to enhance mass transfer and reaction efficiency. The presentation will highlight the importance of integrating electrochemical reaction engineering, materials design, and reactor-scale transport phenomena to develop the next generation of sustainable water treatment technologies.

Advances in electrochemistry, and in particular electroanalytical chemistry, are driven by advances in the tools and methods used to perform electrochemical measurements. One area we currently seek to advance is high-throughput electrochemical measurements. We will describe recent results based on serial and "parallel" measurements, with a focus on a scalable high-throughput electrochemistry platform in a conventional 96-well format - a tool we colloquially call "Legion." We will highlight its operation, performance and applications for materials synthesis and electro-organic chemistry, and consider future challenges and directions.

The electrochemical interface is of fundamental scientific interest and technological importance, but accurate atomic-level simulation remains challenging due to the need for many atoms and extensive sampling. In this talk, I will present a universal machine learning model to address this challenge. Beyond accurately predicting energies and forces, our model also predicts charge and potential distributions, Fermi level and electronic band structure for varying numbers of electrons, and can perform constant-potential / grand-canonical simulation. Our work provides a powerful tool to simulate the electrochemical interface at the atomic level.

Battery safety is a major challenge for the widespread use of advanced energy storage technologies. Although new chemistries such as all-solid-state batteries are often expected to be safer than conventional lithium-ion systems, they can introduce different failure pathways and hazards. In this seminar, I will discuss the importance of evaluating battery safety early in development using a combination of calorimetric experiments and mechanistic interpretation across multiple length scales, and highlight how these approaches reveal thermal failure mechanisms, identify risks missed by conventional testing, and support safer design of next-generation battery systems.