Materials found in nature combine many inspiring properties, such as sophistication, miniaturization, hierarchical organizations,resistance and adaptability.Inspiration from nature’s repertoire to organize and assemble materials on length scales, or biomimic nature's elaborate architectures or systems to design and construct complicated structures with related functions, has brought about a promising area of bio-inspired materials and systems.<br/>The development of an "artificial photosynthetic system" in conceptually simpler form to achieve results of natural photosynthesis that is coupling solar-driven water splitting and CO2 reduction in a way that eliminates the need for an external, sacrificial electron donor is one of the great challenges. It is highly challenging but desirable to develop a promising APS having both the analogous important structural elements and reaction features of natural photosynthesis by constructing (i) efficient mass flow architecture with 3D multiple-scaled hierarchical porosity to suffer minimum gas diffusion, and high surface areas for improved overall reaction and performances. (ii) Unique 3D architecture for enhanced light harvesting. (iii) Suitable catalysts with sufficiently negative conduction band for strong reduction potential. One promising avenue to circumvent such issues concerns biomimetics. A natural leaf is a synergy of complex architectures and functional components to produce an amazing bio-machinery for photosynthesis, that is efficiently harvest solar energy and convert water and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates and oxygen. Natural leaves have demonstrated the perfect assembly of hierarchical levels of porosity into 3D elaborated architectures with high porosity, high connectivity and high surface areas for efficient mass flow including gas exchange and water transportation. Furthermore, the whole architecture of natural leaves strongly favors light harvesting. We demonstrate a design strategy for a promising 3D artificial photosynthetic system (APS) architecture as an efficient mass flow/light harvesting network relying on the morphological replacement of a concept prototype ‒ leaf’s 3D architecture into perovskite titanates (ATiO3, A = Sr, Ca, and Pb) for CO2 photoreduction into hydrocarbon fuels (mainly CO and CH4) . The process uses artificial sunlight as the energy source, water as an electron donor and CO2 as the carbon source, mimicking what real leaves do.

Bioinspired and biotemplated artificial photosynthetic systems for solar fuels generation

249th National Meeting (2015)

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