From August 4th through the 6th, 2021, researchers Siddharth Gupta and Dr Gumaa El-Nagar from the Helmholtz Young Investigator Group “Electrochemical Conversion of CO2” at Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin travelled to the University of Szeged in Hungary to learn more about the work being done at the group of Profs. Csaba Janaky and Balázs Endrődi. Siddharth comments, "The primary aim of the trip was to understand the operating procedure used by the group in Hungary for the EC reactor developed by them in conjunction with ThalesNano. This was done with the view to overcome reproducibility challenges within the consortium and enable rapid catalyst testing whilst obtaining similar performance metrics across the two groups in Berlin and Hungary.

A secondary aim was to look at the system-level design of their EC set up to incorporate missing components and to evaluate different approaches to digitise our systems. This was also done with the view of improving the reproducibility of results across the two groups. Besides these technical aspects, we jointly worked on testing promising ionic-liquid based catalysts developed by HZB for CO Reduction."

Mahendra Patel of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne (EPFL) also visited the University of Szeged, from the 13th to the 17th of September to perform and learn about electrochemical investigations in the dark on the PEC cell with Egon Kecsenovity, Prof. Balázs Endrődi and Professor Csaba Janáky.

Prof. Núria López, Dr Rodrigo García Muelas and Albert Sabadell-Rendón from the ICIQ paid a visit to the Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne (EPFL) from November 1st through the 5th to exchange knowledge about their Density-functional theory (DFT) activities and EPFL's (modelling) and to foster future collaborations.

The MEMBRASENZ team of CEO Dr Jelena Stojadinovic, and Research & Development Engineer Dr Vincent Cremet also visited the University of Szeged to meet with Dr Balázs Endrődi and visit the labs at ThalesNano with Dr Tamas Fodi on the 12th of November 2021. Jelena reports: "We discussed the development of their CO reduction cell and the possibility of testing MEMBRASENZ membranes there in future."