Professor Anthony O'Mullane

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Professor

Role in the Centre

Anthony O’Mullane is an electrochemist who studies the electrochemical fabrication, characterisation and application of a wide range of materials. His work is predominantly focused on materials with energy and environmental remediation applications. A particular focus is the area of electrochemical water splitting to produce clean hydrogen powered by renewable energy sources. The main goal is to develop more efficient materials but also understand the role that composition, structure and crystallinity play and identification of active sites within electrocatalytically active materials. A second area of interest is harnessing the unique properties of room temperature liquid metals to create interesting nanomaterials, i.e. using liquid metal as a synthesis medium to create atomically thin nanomaterials or nanomaterials with interesting compositions. These materials have been investigated as photocatalysts, gas sensing layers, actuators, heavy metal ion detectors, pumps with no mechanical parts, as well as electrocatalysts for the reduction of CO2 gas into solid carbon. The latter is a new avenue of research looking at simple chemical transformations to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. He is also interested in scaling up such technology and plays a significant role in the development of QUT’s Redland pilot plant facility integrating solar energy with electrolysers to produce hydrogen, fuel cells to use the hydrogen as well as additional battery storage all interconnected via a dc microgrid. His fundamental work in the Centre for Materials Science directly feeds into such work being undertaken in QUT’s Centre for Clean Energy Technologies and Practices in which he is a program leader.

Short Biography

Anthony O’Mullane received his BSc Chemistry degree (1997) and PhD degree (2001) from University College Cork (Ireland) and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Technische Universitat Darmstadt (Germany), the University of Warwick (UK), and Monash University (Australia). He previously held a position (2008) at RMIT University (Australia) until moving to QUT in 2013. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (FRACI). He was also an ARC Future Fellow. He is the immediate past-Chair of the Electrochemistry Division of the RACI and served as Vice Chair of the Physical Electrochemistry Division of the International Society of Electrochemistry. He has published over 180 journal articles which have been cited 6800 times. He received an RACI Citation in 2015 for his contribution to chemistry.

Selected Publications

“Room temperature CO2 reduction to solid carbon species on liquid metals featuring atomically thin ceria interfaces” Esrafilzadeh, D.; Zavabeti, A.; Jalili, R.; Atkin, P.; Choi, J.; Carey, B.; Brkljača, R.; O’Mullane, A. P.; Dickey, M.; Officer, D.; MacFarlane, D.; Daeneke, T.; Kalantar-zadeh, K.  Nat. Commun. 2019, 10, 865.

“Gold Doping in a Layered Co-Ni Hydroxide System via Galvanic Replacement for Overall Electrochemical Water Splitting” Sultana, U. K.; Riches, J. D.; O’Mullane, A. P. Adv. Funct. Mater. 2018, 1804361.

“Galvanic Replacement of the Liquid Metal Galinstan” Hoshyargar, F.; Crawford, J.; O’Mullane, A. P. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2017, 139, 1464.

“A liquid metal reaction environment for the room-temperature synthesis of atomically thin metal oxides” Zavabeti, A.; Ou, J. Z.; Carey, B. J.; Syed, N.; Orrell-Trigg, R.; Mayes, E. L. H.; Xu, C.; Kavehei, O.; O’Mullane, A. P.; Kaner, R. B.; Kalantar-zadeh, K.; Daeneke, T.  Science 2017, 358, 332.

“Stabilising lithium metal using ionic liquids for long lived batteries” Basile, A.; Bhatt, A. I.; O’Mullane, A. P. Nat. Commun. 2016, 7, 11794.

Projects (Chief investigator)

Projects