Hermenegildo García, researcher at the Institute of Chemical Technology (ITQ), a joint research centre of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), has received the ERC Proof of Concept Grant from the European Research Council. The UPV professor has been awarded this prestigious grant, worth €150,000, for the one-year development of the MXClean project, 'Green Bottom-Up Synthesis of MXenes'. The ERC Proof of Concept is the second ERC Grant awarded to the researcher, following the ERC Consolidator Grant he received in 2024.

The MXClean project will develop a new method for preparing MXenes, nanomaterials 1 nanometre thick (a million times thinner than a human hair) made up of metals. This method will involve the use of multi-metal materials and nitrides, based on molecular complexes, using the bottom-up methodology, in which nanostructures are manufactured from individual molecules.

This new synthesis route will enable the preparation of MXenos on a larger scale. In addition, the process will be much more sustainable, as it will avoid the use of corrosive, fluoride and highly polluting reagents used in current production.

'Receiving this ERC Proof of Concept Grant will allow my team and me at the ITQ (CSIC-UPV) to scale up one of the results of my research and continue investigating the preparation of MXenes, materials with a bright future and a large number of applications,' explains Hermenegildo García.

Specifically, the applications of this innovative material cover fields such as biomedicine – for tissue repair, large-scale energy storage, and hydrogen generation from water with the highest possible efficiency, among many others.

The MXClean project will scale up to an industrial level the research developed in the Discovery project, for which Hermenegildo García obtained an ERC Advanced Grant in September 2024. Discovery developed catalysts from MXenos and proposed the activation of reactions using sunlight as the primary energy source with these MXenos.

'The next steps in the research involve the manufacture of a prototype that demonstrates that any of the materials using MXenos can be prepared without the use of undesirable reagents,' says Hermenegildo García.

Hermenegildo García Gómez (Canals, 1957) conducts his research at the ITQ (CSIC-UPV) and teaches in the Chemistry Department at the UPV. At the ITQ (CSIC-UPV), he works within a multidisciplinary research group that has achieved significant results in converting solar energy into green hydrogen and solar fuels through the development of photocatalysts, some of which are based on graphene.

His working group coined the term carbocatalysis, which uses graphene and its derivatives, from agricultural waste, as heterogeneous catalysts in different chemical processes for transforming CO2 into methanol and for the storage of electrical energy in supercapacitors.

In 2016, he was awarded the Jaume I Prize for New Technologies, and in 2021, he received the National Research Prize in the area of Chemical Sciences and Technology. He has published more than 970 articles in scientific journals in the fields of chemistry, materials and the environment and has filed more than 70 patents.

MXenes were discovered in 2011 and have attracted worldwide attention as electrocatalysts due to their electrical conductivity and high activity for oxygen evolution and reduction, as well as for hydrogen evolution.

MXenes have also attracted growing interest in the field of photocatalysis, mainly as co-catalysts for photoactive semiconductors.

The properties of MXenes, which are ideal for use as thermal catalysts, have been little explored, so there are few precedents for using MXenes to accelerate and control selectivity in chemical reactions.