National Center for Catalysis Research, IIT Madras (NCCR) is offering an online course on the conversion of carbon dioxide into fuel, along the lines of massive online open course (MOOC) efforts such as Coursera, Udacity, edX, etc. The course is being offered by Dr B. Viswanathan of NCCR.
Global carbon dioxide emissions are growing, and there is a pressing need to lower the carbon dioxide footprint for climate change and global warming concerns. One route is to convert carbon dioxide into usable chemicals and fuels. This way, a fraction of it can be recycled into useful products. This is a difficult scientific problem and the subject of intense research worldwide. For that reason, the course is timely.
The course is meant to be taught at a research level. However, given the modular nature of the 25 lectures (each lecture can be understood stand-alone) this could help a wide range of advanced undergraduate and graduate students. This will also help industry professionals. Given the rapidly evolving nature of the subject and lack of adequate textbook resources on the topic, this course aims to fill the niche. Since the lectures are archived, students can take the course at their own leisure. The lectures can be found online by searching for the phrase — “Carbondioxide to chemical and fuels: Lecture 1: Introduction.” Prof. Viswanathan can be contacted through the NCCR website.