Solar water oxidation is an important step for photosynthesis, during which electrons are extracted from H2O for subsequent reductions of H+ or CO2. Over the past decades, there have been parallel lines of efforts in improving solar water oxidation catalysis, one of which focused on heterogeneous catalysts and the other on homogeneous catalysts. There has been a significant gap in these two parallel areas. In this talk, we present our recent efforts in bridging such a gap. We show that when immobilized onto photoelectrodes, molecular catalysts can enable high performance solar water oxidation by taking advantage of the best of both worlds, the high activity enabled by molecular understanding and the good stability offered by heterogeneous catalysis. Moreover, we show that a facile photochemical treatment can remove the organic ligands of the molecular catalysts to transform them into true heterogeneous catalysts, but with well-defined atomic structures for mechanistic studies. A new door toward heterogeneous catalysis is opened up.

Immobilizing molecular catalysts for solar water oxidation

256th National Meeting (2018)

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