Solar energy harvesting provides a long-term solution to meet our future energy needs. Converting solar energy to chemical energy, as practiced by plants in natural photosynthesis for eons, requires three fundamental steps: sunlight absorption by antennae to create charge-separated excited states, creation of redox equivalents and their vectorial migration to reactive centers, and catalytic reactions to store chemical energy in the products using vectorially delivered electrons and holes. Molecular systems capable of individual steps have been developed and extensively studied during the past several decades. However, these functional components need to be integrated into hierarchically organized structures to perform the ultimate task of solar energy harvesting. We hypothesized that MOFs provide a versatile model system to integrate different functional components for solar energy conversion. In this talk, I would like to discuss our recent progress on designing photoactive MOFs for light-harvesting, proton reduction, and water oxidation, with particular focuses on how to integrate different functional components in a hierarchical fashion to achieve photocatalytic water splitting and on how to use MOFs as a novel platform to unravel the mechanistic details that are difficult to obtain for their homogeneous counterparts.

Metal-organic frameworks for solar energy utilization

245th National Meeting (2013)

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