Solar fuels

Abstract

Our NSF funded CCI Solar Fuels Program involves many experimentalists and theorists in an interdisciplinary effort with the goal of developing light absorbers and catalysts that could be incorporated in devices to split water to hydrogen and oxygen. Our emphasis is on heterogeneous and homogeneous catalysts made from earth-abundant elements that could be part of scalable solar fuel devices. While homogeneous catalysts typically degrade faster than their heterogeneous counterparts, mol. systems are much easier to study mechanistically. In recent work on hydrogen evolution from protic solns. catalyzed by a tripodal phosphine cobalt complex, we have shown that the dominant reaction channel involves a Co(II)-hydride as the reactive intermediate. The lessons we have learned from such mechanistic investigations are guiding the design and construction of very active catalysts both for water redn. and oxidn.

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