Plasma Laser Ablation & Surface Modelling Antwerp – Plasma catalysis for CO2 recycling

Research Group:	Plasma Laser Ablation & Surface Modelling Antwerp (PLASMANT)
Host institution:	University of Antwerp (UAntwerp)
Location:	Antwerp, Belgium
Involved Persons:	Annemie Bogaerts (ESR 3 and 10)

General description: The research group PLASMANT performs research on plasma for various applications, but mainly for environmental/energy applications (CO₂ conversion and N₂ fixation into value-added chemicals and fuels) and plasma medicine (cancer treatment). The research is based on modeling of the plasma chemistry, plasma reactor design and plasma-surface interactions (including also liquid and biomolecules), as well as experiments to obtain more insight and improve the applications.

PLASMANT belongs to the chemistry department of the University of Antwerp (UAntwerp), which is is ranked 14^th in the World and 7^th in Europe among the “young” universities (existing less than 50 years) and is ranked 210^th among all universities in the QS World University Rankings 2018. The group PLASMANT belongs to the NANO Center of Excellence of UAntwerp, and to the technology transfer consortium on Sustainable Chemistry of UAntwerp.

Persons involved in PIONEER:

Annemie Bogaerts is full professor in Physical Chemistry and head of the group PLASMANT. She has more than 20 years of experience with plasma modelling and plasma chemistry and has over 450 peer-reviewed publications since 1995, above 11,500 citations (in WoS; above 16,000 in Google Scholar (GS)) and an H-index of 52 (63 in GS). She has supervised 29 successful PhD students. She was head of the Educational Commission Chemistry and Head of the Chemistry Department. She is also in the editorial board of several journals, and in the international scientific committee of various conferences. She is also member of the Board of Directors of the International Plasma Chemistry Society. She was recently granted a prestigious ERC Synergy Grant for the plasma catalytic conversion of small molecules (CO₂ , CH₄ and N₂ ), with researchers from University of Messina (Italy), Warwick (UK) and Adelaide (Australia).

Representative publications:

A. Bogaerts and E. Neyts, Plasma technology: An emerging technology for energy storage, ACS Energy Lett. 3 (2018) 1013-1027. Invited feature article, and selected to be featured in ACS Editors’ Choice + Free Open Access.
R. Snoeckx and A. Bogaerts, Plasma technology – a novel solution for CO₂ conversion?, Chem. Soc. Rev. 46 (2017) 5805-5863.
R. Snoeckx, S. Heijkers, K. Van Wesenbeeck, S. Lenaerts, and A. Bogaerts, CO₂ conversion in a dielectric barrier discharge plasma: N₂ in the mix as a helping hand or problematic impurity? Energ. Environ. Sci. 9 (2016) 999-1011.
E. C. Neyts, K. Ostrikov, M. K. Sunkara, and A. Bogaerts, Plasma catalysis: synergistic effects at the nanoscale. Chem. Rev. 115 (2015) 13408-13446.
R. Aerts, W. Somers, and A. Bogaerts, Carbon dioxide splitting in a dielectric barrier discharge plasma: a combined experimental and computational study. ChemSusChem 8 (2015) 702-716.