The increasing population demands more and more resources from earth causing distress on the environment. One resource is the energy needed for all our daily activities, as well as the energy needed to grow, manufacture and provide all the necessities mankind demands. This energy has come from non-renewable resources like oil, which generate green house gasses and are responsible for global warming and pollution. One possible solution is to use renewable resources that are plentiful and free, for example solar energy. Although solar energy could not be easily used for every application and it is not available at night; therefore there is the need to find a clean, inexpensive way to store solar energy. One way is converting it into chemical energy like hydrogen.The concept of reducing protons to hydrogen through solar energy has already been proven but only with a very low efficiency.1 One of the key components to increase the efficiency of such a photoelectrochemical cell is the photosensitizer dye. This dye needs to have an appropriate excited-state reduction potential to generate an overpotential high enough to be able to drive the photoproduction of hydrogen efficiently. We have designed and synthesized noble photosensitizer dyes utilizing axially substituted siliconphthalocianines but came across the same problem of low electron injection into the semiconductor nanoparticles. The synthesis of such dyes was difficult and only to find out in the end they were not efficient. Then we turned to molecular modeling to calculate the orbital overlap of the dyes before they are synthesized to increase our success rate and also accelerate our research process, since it is faster to do the molecular modeling calculations nowadays.(1) M. Hambourger, G. F. Moore, D. M. Kramer, D. Gust, A. L. Moore, and T. A. Moore, Chem. Soc. Rev, 38, 25�35 (2009)

Design, modeling, and synthesis of phthalocyanine based dyes for the production of solar hydrogen

245th National Meeting (2013)

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