Solar activated catalysts for multi-electron reactions

This project is addressing our need for sustainable, environmentally friendly, efficient, long living and scalable systems for solar energy harvesting and storage.

Beside batteries or physical storage in form of pressure or elevated mass energetic chemical reactions are an excellent to store energy that potentially can even be employed in a decentralized approach.

Many useful reactions like the conversion of CO2 to methanol or both parts of the water splitting reaction (e.g. hydrogenase) require multiple electrons to proceed.

We select three promising solutions to address this challenge that store and utilize charges at different places in an intra-molecular charge transfer cascade and have shown a basic functionality.

We investigate how we can use large atoms that can have different oxidation states and how the reaction proceeds at these catalytic centers.

We also study two approaches that include micro-structures of multiple atoms capable of storing and provide multiple electrons to the reaction.

The focus of this project lies on tracing and understanding the charge transfer and reaction processes with state of the art spectroscopic methods under laboratory and catalytic conditions.

Based upon this knowledge we will then optimize and combine different charge transfer and accumulation strategies with the aim to enable a novel class of catalyst for solar energy harvesting.