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Continuing its scientific research efforts as the beacon of scientific development and society transformation towards modernity, Zewail City of Science and Technology; Egypt’s national project for science renaissance, declared the publication of two new researches with an international acclaim from the American Chemical Society-Applied materials & Interfaces.

Considered as a great success in their fields, both researches have been conducted in the Center for Materials Science in Zewail City by the in house team of researchers and under the leadership of Dr. Mohamed Alkordi, head of the Egyptian research team at Zewail City of Science and Technology, along with significant contribution from other local and international affiliations.

The first research synthetic approach is to construct microporous solids on top of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs). The approach calls for constructing a porous-organic polymer (POP) through bottom-up assembly from its molecular precursors atop MWCNTs, in a one-pot synthesis, affording a composite material POP@MWCNTs.

The importance of such research is reflected in the future technologies for CO2 capture and sequestration, being actively investigated to relieve the negative impacts of growing carbon footprint resulted from heavy dependence of fossil fuel. The reported bottom-up approach paves the road for further investigations of relevant systems towards truly heterogeneous electro catalytic systems, particularly towards CO2 capture and sequestration, as well as potentially towards sensing applications.

While the second scientific research is critically touches a current global demand which is the dilemma of finding clean energy sources. The study demonstrate a novel pathway to tackle this challenge by constructing a new material based on hemoglobin molecules immobilized within porous polymer network, all deposited on electrically conductive graphene sheets, affording a composite that can efficiently catalyze the oxygen reduction reaction, much more effective than any of the three components studied separately.

This newly synthesized material is of an important role in enhancing the activity of ORR and can open up new opportunities that will potentially affect the fuel cell technology.

Both studies were highlighted on the front cover of the American Chemical Society-Applied materials & Interfaces journal, for more information please visit:

pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.7b06146

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0926337317301133