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Centre for Sustainable Energy Development

Exploring clean, renewable and sustainable energy systems
We focus on clean energy technologies and their role in mitigating climate change, and explore new ways to help deliver sustainable energy solutions on a global scale.

About the centre

The Centre for Sustainable Energy Development, within the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, was established in 2010 to provide a comprehensive research approach to sustainable energy harvesting, transport, storage, and utilisation.

This approach, enhanced by the utilisation of the Laboratory of Advanced Carbon Materials, Laboratory for Catalysis Engineering, Laboratories for Green Chemistry and Plasma, School’s Analytical Centre and other facilities across the University of Sydney, provides an important resource for both industry and the wider community to develop new or improved sustainable energy processes and create discoveries for tackling the relevant complexities.

Our laboratories and facilities

The Advanced Carbon Research Laboratory is involved in research on materials, sustainable chemical processes, and energy device development. The laboratory has comprehensive material synthesis and characterisation facilities for various energy systems, including batteries, supercapacitors, fuel cells and electrolysers.

The Catalysis Engineering Laboratory is focused on developing nano catalysts and processes for CO2 capture and transformation, hydrocarbon transformation, bio-refining, waste to products using in-situ manipulations, green hydrogen production and eventually design, prototyping, testing and scaling up of such systems.

The Laboratory for Green Chemistry and Plasma is involved in developing plasma driven electrochemical conversion of N2 and CO2 to sustainable chemicals and production of green fuels. The aim is to employ plasma as the Power-to-X strategy to electrify the chemical engineering industries.

The recently upgraded Analytical Centre at the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering has state-of-the-art equipment for the characterisation and analysis of materials and chemical systems. This includes scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy, Raman system, IR and UV spectrometers, gas chromatography mass spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analyser, as well as many other systems.

Our people