Solar energy harvesting provides a long-term solution to meet our future energy needs. In order to convert solar energy to chemical energy, we need to develop materials that are capable of performing 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. Although molecular systems capable of individual steps have been developed and extensively studied, there are not efficient ways of integrating these functional components into hierarchically organized structures to perform the ultimate task of artificial photosynthesis by storing the harvested solar energy in chemical bonds. We hypothesized that metal-organic frameworks (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. I will also discuss the strategies to integrate different functional components to achieve photocatalytic water splitting and 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 light-harvesting, water oxidation, and proton reduction

248th National Meeting (2014)

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