Polymer Nanoparticle for Hydrogen Evolution

Photocatalytic solar fuel production is a potential route to produce clean, renewable and sustainable fuels and chemicals, which would reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

Carbon-based materials and organic semiconductors nanoparticles have emerged as potential low cost and efficient photocatalyst materials for hydrogen evolution.

However, the photophysical properties of such nanoparticles, and thus the design requirements for optimum function, remain essentially unexplored.

This MSCA project, PolyNanoCat, focus on state-of-the-art polymer/non-fullerene acceptor bulk heterojunction nanoparticles as photocatalysts for hydrogen evolution, addressing their previously unexplored photophysical properties.

Multiple factors are likely to determine the photophysics of photocatalysts and their solar to hydrogen efficiency, including polymer microstructure, defects and metal atoms addition, but these factors have only received very limited study to date.

The PolyNanoCat project aim to correlate the photocatalytic activities of polymer/non-fullerene bulk heterojunction nanoparticles for hydrogen evolution with their photophysical properties by using transient absorption and emission spectroscopic techniques, in order to understand their structure/function relationships with the mechanism involved in the photocatalysis process.

The correlation between the photocatalytic activity and the photophysic processes involved in solar-to-fuel production by polymer photocatalysts provide material design guidance for novel, stable and efficient photocatalysts.