The Pioneer Center initiative

The establishment of the Pioneer Centers is an ambitious national undertaking initiated by the Ministry of Higher Education and Science
and developed in close cooperation (and co-financing) between the Ministry, the Danish National Research Foundation, the Carlsberg Foundation, the Lundbeck Foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, and the Villum Foundation, as well as Danish universities.

Read more about the Pioneer Center initiative here.

The Pioneer Center for Accelerating P2X Materials Discovery—in daily parlance CAPeX—will, among other activities, develop more efficient and robust materials to convert water and CO2 into sustainable fuels and chemicals using green power from wind turbines and solar cells.

The most efficient materials used today to produce hydrogen by means of electrolysis are based on rare minerals and earth elements. One of the most important challenges for CAPeX is to develop new, sustainable catalysts for electrolysis that are scalable and can be used globally and to provide sustainable solutions for, among other areas, heavy transport and air traffic, that can be made so efficient and inexpensive that they meet the UN’s climate goals.

CAPeX brings together leading experts and competencies from Danish universities and three international consortia to create a new, powerful materials acceleration platform (MAP) for the rapid development of materials. A MAP combines computer simulations, experiments, and synthesis robots in a closed loop, including by means of artificial intelligence. The platform is expected to increase the pace of development of new materials five to ten times.

The center, which is run in a partnership between DTU and Aalborg University (AAU), is located in a new interdisciplinary “Climate Challenge Laboratory” at DTU. Here, researchers from DTU, AAU, the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University, and the University of Southern Denmark will create a groundbreaking interdisciplinary environment for power-to-X technology in collaboration with international partners from Stanford University, Utrecht University, and the University of Toronto.

Center leader: Tejs Vegge, Professor;
Frede Blaabjerg, Professor
Host institution: DTU and AAU
Grant: 300 million DKK
Web: https://capex.dtu.dk/