PolymersForSolarFuel · Conjugated Polymers for Light-Driven Hydrogen Evolution from Water

Conjugated Polymers for Light-Driven Hydrogen Evolution from Water

With a steadily increasing demand of the global energy consumption and reliance of geopolitically sensitive sources of energy, such as petroleum and coal, there has never been such an urgency to explore alternative clean, renewable energy supplies. Aside from the obvious limitations in availability, those raw materials and their combustion products are considered polluting and low-efficient. The clean, sustainable production of hydrogen is one promising strategy for future zero-emission energy supply. In this context, photocatalysis using heterogeneous semiconductors for water splitting has received much attention. Progress has been made in the application of both inorganic and organic semiconductors, the latter triggered by the studies on carbon nitride and later conjugated polymers. The modularity of these materials over a wide range of monomer building blocks allows the transfer of photocatalytically active subunits from one class of materials into another. This allows us, in principle, to build structure-property relationships where molecular effects are deconvoluted from solid state packing effects. However, the modularity of these materials taken together with a wide range of accessible monomer building blocks results in a very large possible chemical space, even for ‘simple’ (A-B)n-type co-polymers. The aim of the project PolymersForSolarFuel was to address globally relevant challenges in the field of renewable energy generation and storage. Combination of established concepts from the fields of photovoltaics, photocatalysis, and polymer synthesis built the foundation of this project and enabled the development of novel sustainable materials for solar-driven evolution of hydrogen from water. The PolymersForSolarFuel project aims to: a) investigate organic materials and contribute to an overall database of photoactive compounds, b) select most promising candidates through property-related screening, c) cross-examine physical (two-component) and chemical (one-component) combinations of such materials and identify most promising final candidate(s) and d) develop scale-up protocols and assemble a prototype of a feasible size. By meeting these goals, a better structure-function relationship in photocatalytically active polymers that facilitates the search of new catalysts within the chemical space will be achieved.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union