Project description
Advancing energy conversion and chemical transformation systems
The increasing frequency of natural disasters worldwide highlights the urgent need to address climate change through the development and implementation of effective solutions, policies and technologies. One critical area in this effort is the advancement of novel energy conversion solutions, especially for green energy technologies. The ERC-funded More4Less project aims to develop proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) shuttles that can significantly improve the transformation of N2, CO and CO2 into valuable resources. The project will enhance PCET capabilities to harness light and water, while ensuring efficiency and selectivity are maintained. Moreover, it will focus on improving integration for practical applications, offering valuable insights into future energy conversion and catalytic systems.
Objective
Protons and electrons are the currency of energy conversion and play a key role in some of the most transformative technologies such as the reduction of N2, CO or CO2. Exploiting water and sunlight as renewable resources for these transformations offers a means for solar-to-chemicals conversion. Thus, our ability to control the transfer of protons and electrons preventing the more favourable formation of H2 poses an exciting fundamental problem.
Strategies based on proton coupled electron transfer (PCET) have demonstrated key benefits by providing low energy pathways that bypass the most energetic, charged intermediates. However, important problems remain regarding the development of PCET shuttles that: (1) behave as catalysts harnessing water and light, (2) promote multi PCET to avoid unstable radical intermediates that undermine the selectivity and efficiency, and (3) can be integrated in complex multielectron/multiproton transformations relevant to solar energy conversion such as N2 reduction.
I will address these problems by designing metal-organic PCET shuttles that target three specific objectives: (1) to merge light and electricity for reductive PCET in a novel photoelectrocatalytic strategy using molecular shuttles that exploit counter oxidation reactions of practical relevance, (2) to achieve an unprecedented control over multi PCET to impact the selectivity of reductive transformations via the colocalization of redox and acid/base sites within coordination cages, and (3) to integrate photo(electro)catalytic PCET in small molecule catalysis with new tandem approaches towards the reduction of N2 using light and water.
Overall, these objectives will provide unconventional tools to affect the mechanisms of reductive reactions. Besides transgressing the frontiers of knowledge in the field of PCET, and more generally energy conversion, More4Less has the potential to change the paradigm in which we develop catalytic systems for solar-to-chemical transformation.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
18071 Granada
Spain