WATIO · Water on TiO2
FP7 — People (Marie Curie Actions)
- Duration
- 2013-04-01 → 2017-03-31
- EU contribution
- €100,000
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MC-CIG
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Water on TiO2
Fossil fuels are present in limited amounts on earth and produce green house gases by their combustion. A very promising, environmentally-friendly alternative energy source is hydrogen. Hydrogen can be produced photocatalytically from water on a titanium dioxide (TiO2) electrode. Since the discovery of the hydrogen production under the influence of light, much research has been performed to make the process more efficient. As this optimization is mostly performed through a trial-and-error approach, fundamental knowledge of the process has been lacking up to now. The aim of the research performed with the Marie Curie Career Integration Grant was to obtain fundamental knowledge of the process by looking at specifically the molecules at the interface, before, during and after their dissociation. We proposed to study how water is bound to the catalyst, what the relation between structure and reactivity is, and what the dynamics of the photodissociation reaction are. We used the surface sensitive technique sum-frequency generation (SFG) to obtain information about the molecules at the water-TiO2 interface. In the first year of the project we learned how to make clean TiO2 interfaces, characterized them, and did some first SFG studies on the samples.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Hydrogen produced by sunlight is a very promising, environmentally-friendly energy source as an alternative for fossil fuels, which are limited present on earth and produce green house gases by their combustion. Since the discovery of hydrogen production by photocatalytic water dissociation on a titanium dioxide (TiO2) electrode 40 years ago, much research has been performed to make the process more efficient mostly through a trial-and-error approach. However, fundamental knowledge of how water is bound to the catalyst, what the relation between structure and reactivity is, and what the dynamics of the photodissociation reaction are, is lacking up to now, because no suitable techniques were available. The aim of this proposal is to answer these fundamental questions by looking at specifically the molecules at the interface, before and during their dissociation. With the surface sensitive spectroscopic technique sum-frequency generation (SFG) we can look explicitly at the monolayer of water molecules at the interface. A recent expansion of this technique into two-dimensional SFG will allow us to determine the heterogeneity of the water molecules at the interface. Moreover, the dynamics of the photodissociation of water on TiO2 will be investigated by applying pump-probe sum-frequency generation spectroscopy. At variable delay times after the pump pulse the probe pulses will interrogate the interface and detect the reaction intermediates and products. Due to recent developments of this SFG technique it should now be possible to determine the structure of water at the TiO2 interface and to unravel the dynamics of the photodissocation process. The results will be essential for understanding the fundamentals of the water dissociation process at oxide surfaces and thus for developing cheaper and more efficient photocatalysts for the production of hydrogen.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER WISSENSCHAFTEN EV · MUNCHENCoordinatorGermany
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union