All-in-one light-driven water splitting

In light of global climate change, there is an urgent need to develop

efficient ways of obtaining and storing power from renewable energy sources. The photocatalytic splitting of water into hydrogen fuel and oxygen provides a particularly attractive approach in this context. However, efficient implementation of this process, which mimics biological photosynthesis,

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is technically very challenging, since it involves a combination of processes that can interfere with each other. Now, LMU physicists led by Dr. Jacek Stolarczyk and Professor Jochen Feldmann, in collaboration with chemists at the University of Würzburg led by Professor Frank Würthner, have succeeded in demonstrating the complete splitting of water with the help of an all-in-one catalytic system for the first time. Their new study appears in the journal Nature Energy.

Technical methods for the photocatalytic splitting of water molecules use synthetic components to mimic the complex processes that take place during natural photosynthesis. In such systems, semiconductor nanoparticles that absorb light quanta (photons) can, in principle, serve as the photocatalysts.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-09-all-in-one-light-driven.html#jCp