On 19th December 20202, 15 partners of the project met on-line to discuss research activities and potential collaborations. It provides a great opportunity for future collaborations in relation to secondment, new research collaborations and develop a sustain network for low-carbon technologies development. A few pictures are attached below.

On 25^th September 2020, project partners met the EU Project Officer, Mr Radu DIACONESCU. Due to Covid-19, the meeting was on-line using MS Teams.

The meeting agenda and the key presentation are attached below. During the meeting, key issues such as WP implementation, secondment, events and financial aspects were discussed. In general, the progress of the project is satisfactory, although the delivery of project has been significantly affected by the Covid-19. The EU Officer also talked to a few secondees who have visited Xi’an Jiaotong University. A key action was to update the Year 1 report by including more details of the implementation of WPs including deviations. Possible extension of the project has also been discussed. However, the decision will depend on following evaluation of the situation related to Covid-19.

More than 100 participants have attended the UKCSCST2020 conference on 11-12 September 2020, which has 4 plenary talks, 11 invited keynote presentations, 34 oral presentations, oral presentation from ALP, SCI, and over 30 poster presentations. One Emerging Award was given in addition to 3 oral awards and 3 poster awards supported by SCI, and one oral and one poster award supported by RSC Applied Catalysis Group. The following pictures show some activities in the conferences. Great presentation, great interactions and discussion.

27th Joint Annual Conference of the Chinese Society of Chemical Science and Technology in the UK and Society of Chemical Industry’s Chinese UK Regional Group (UKCSCST-SCI) is organised by Queen’s University Belfast on 11th-12th September 2020. We are pleased to announce the conference programme (PDF link below) including the list of oral and poster presentations.

CSCST-SCI 2020 Programme – Final -Final – with TEAM links – 26 August 2020

The conference will be delivered using MS TEAM. TEAM links are included in the conference programme.

Dr Shaojun Xu gave a lecture for the introduction of heterogeneous catalysis and characterisations. More than 50 participants from the project partners are participating the workshop. Two presentation documents can be obtained by clicking the title below:

UK workshop_in situ analysis – Dr Luwei Chen

SX_Introduction of heterogeneous catalysis and characterisations – Dr Shaojun Xu

The following pictures are screenshots from the workshop.

Dr Shaoliang Guan introduced the fundamental of XPS analysis and the use of CasaXPS for data processing and analysis.

Dr Luwei Chen from Institute of Chemical and Engineering Sciences, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A* STAR), Singapore, gave a very interesting introduction of in-situ catalyst characterisation for different reactions including a few case studies.

Dr Jun Huang from University of Sydney introduced solid state NRM analysis and its applications for mechanisms studies in particular in zeolite related research.

In summary, each workshop has around 60 participants and provides valuable knowledge of catalyst characterisation and the application in heterogeneous catalysis. Some nice discussion happened at the end of workshop.