Not only plants can use sunlight to produce valuable chemicals from CO2 and water. With the right technology, CO2 can be stimulated to produce methane, methanol or formic acid in a process called photocatalysis or artificial photosynthesis. While today the efficiency of photocatalysis is still limited, the vision of using CO2 as a resource is driving intensive research and development worldwide.
In order to convert CO2 into so-called solar fuels (methane, methanol or formic acid), it must interact with water (here in the form of steam) on the surface of a catalyst, where sufficient free electrons and holes are available to drive reduction and oxidation processes. The absorption of photon energy can create electron-hole pairs in certain materials, such as titanium dioxide (TiO2), to drive the required chemical reactions. With current materials, however, this only works with light wavelengths in the UV range, which is only about 10% of the solar spectrum.
One way to increase electron-hole production with sunlight, even in the visible range, is to increase the local intensity of the electromagnetic field by placing a grid of metallic nanoantennas on the surface of TiO2. The efficiency of this approach will be improved in this project by exploiting the exceptional optoelectronic properties of two-dimensional materials such as graphene and molybdenum disulphide (MoS2). At the ZBT, the photocatalysts produced nanolithographically by the project partner AMO GmbH will be investigated in a photoreactor specially adapted to the requirements of the 2D materials with regard to their activity and selectivity for the production of the desired solar fuels. ZBT has extensive experience in the field of gas process technology and chemical reaction engineering and was also able to build up expertise in the field of process engineering for the investigation of photocatalysts in the current NRW lead market project HyperSol, which is now directly contributing to the ACOMAT project.
The ACOMAT project is funded by the Ministry of the Environment, Agriculture, Nature Conservation and Consumer Protection of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia as part of the Special Environmental Economy Programme. This programme, which was launched in autumn 2020 as part of the "Corona-Help" programme, aims to support small and medium-sized enterprises to continue research and development in the field of the Green Economy despite the current pandemic and to stimulate new start-ups.
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