Water-Oxidation Catalysis by Cobalt Polyoxometalates vs Anion-Stabilized Cobalt-Oxide Nanoparticles: A Critical Comparison En Route to the True, Superior Catalysts

通过这一奖项，化学系的化学催化项目资助了科罗拉多州立大学的理查德·G·芬克的研究，该研究旨在确定从阳光中提取能量的最佳催化剂。将太阳能转换为可用的气体或液体燃料是发展安全、可持续能源未来的核心科学挑战。一种前景看好且经过充分研究的方法是利用太阳能将水分解成氢和氧的组成成分。在使用这种方法时，科学家们正在模拟生命的一个基本过程，在这个过程中，植物通过光合作用从光中提取能量。在实验室中，太阳能被用来在催化剂的帮助下分解水分子，催化剂可以从水的氧原子中释放出水的氢原子，产生清洁燃烧的氢燃料和一种安全而有用的副产品氧气。本项目致力于开发高效的钴制水裂解催化剂。这些催化剂是目前最有前途的催化剂之一，因为它们的储量丰富，成本低，而且具有优异的裂水能力。这项工作的重点是更准确地了解这些催化剂是如何工作的，并在此过程中导致更好、更高效的催化剂的开发。该项目通过开发和改进一种潜在的关键能源技术，并通过培训未来一代科学家，正在产生广泛的影响。这项研究特别考虑将均相多金属钴作为裂水催化剂。首先，研究人员专注于确定真正的催化物种的性质，因为他们实验室的先前结果表明，多相氧化钴实际上是主要的催化剂。目前的研究涉及另一种假设，即多相氧化钴纳米颗粒是真正的催化剂，由多金属钴在催化操作条件下形成，这些非均相氧化钴纳米颗粒是一种寿命更长、活性更高的水氧化催化剂，因此是一类优越的水氧化催化剂。正在进行的研究正在帮助理清这些细节，因此，有助于开发利用太阳能分解水的新的更好的催化剂。

With this award, the Chemical Catalysis Program in the Chemistry Division is funding Richard G. Finke of Colorado State University for research aimed at determining the best catalysts for the extraction of energy from sunlight. Conversion of solar energy to usable gaseous or liquid fuels is a central scientific challenge to the development of a secure, sustainable energy future. One promising and well-studied approach uses solar energy to split water into its constitutive components of hydrogen and oxygen. In using this approach, scientists are mimicking one of the basic processes of life in which plants extract the energy from light through photosynthesis. In the laboratory, solar energy is used to split a water molecule with the help of a catalyst that can release the water's hydrogen atoms from its oxygen atom, producing clean-burning hydrogen fuel plus a safe and useful byproduct, oxygen gas. This project is focused on the development of efficient water-splitting catalysts made from cobalt. These catalysts are some of the most promising ones available, due to their abundance, low-cost and superior water-splitting ability. The work is focused on more precisely understanding how these catalysts work and, in the process, is leading to the development of better and more efficient catalysts. The project is having a broad impact through the development and refinement of a potentially crucial energy technology and also through the training of a future generation of scientists.The research is considering, in particular, homogeneous cobalt polyoxometalates as water-splitting catalysts. The investigators are, first, focused on determining the nature of the true catalytic species, since prior results from their lab indicated that a heterogeneous cobalt oxide was actually the dominant catalyst. Current research involves an alternative hypothesis that heterogeneous cobalt-oxide nanoparticles are the true catalysts, formed from cobalt polyoxometalates under the catalytic operating conditions and that those heterogeneous cobalt-oxide nanoparticles are a longer lived, more active and therefore superior class of water-oxidation catalysts. The ongoing research is helping to sort out these details and, therefore, contributing to the development of new and better catalysts for the splitting of water using solar energy.