Solid State Chemistry

Principal Investigator

Maria Helena Mendonça
Assistant  Professor, PhD Universidade de Lisboa (1994)

Research

The main goal of the Solid State Chemistry group is the synthesis and characterization of inorganic materials, namely binary and ternary oxide materials exploring different synthesis methods, and methodologies, to design each material, in order to tailor its properties and improve its functionality for a specific application, such as:

Environment protection – Development of new catalysts for toxic pollutants and pharmaceutical drugs degradation, by means of photocatalysis or photoelectrocatalysis processes. The group combines different materials composition with specific methods of synthesis to design the catalyst surface, which is crucial to improve the catalytic activity.

Energy conversion – The manufacture and improvement of photoanodes for dye-sensitised solar cells (DSSC) is an area where the SSC group has been working. The main objective of our work is the enlargement of metal oxide based nanostructures that maximize the electron transport, enhancing the power conversion efficiencies of the DSSC device, using low-cost and soft processing methods.

Biomedicine – One of the biomedical applications of magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles is magnetic hyperthermia for cancer therapy, a technique which allows to destroy cancer cells, also increasing the efficiency of chemo- or radiotherapy. Our group is particularly interested in the development of new biocompatible materials with magnetic properties suitable to make them good candidates for magnetic hyperthermia for cancer therapy.