P3.6 Photocatalytic generation of oxalate under high-purity conditions
Supervisors:
Topic and overall goal:
The photocatalytic CO2 reduction to hydrocarbon fuels is a highly promising energy conversion (solar-to-chemical) process. As CO2 is a thermodynamically very stable molecule (ΔG° = -394 kJ mol-1), any carbon-based impurity present in a photoreactor, is likely to react first leading to the formation of carbonaceous products, falsely attributed to performance of the photocatalyst. A reactor constructed for and operated under high-purity conditions is critical to collect reproducible data and reach reliable conclusions. Especially for the formation of oxalate using TM based systems previous studies showed that impurities and can lead to misinterpretation of the catalytic data. We would like to address this important question using a customized reaction setup for the study of photocatalytic CO2 coupling under high-purity conditions.