Bio-inspired oxygen evolving light driven catalysts (BOLDCATS)

可再生能源领域的主要挑战是设计出可持续的方法来制造燃料，最好是可用于航空等应用的致密便携式燃料。地球上有一种主要的生化/化学过程可以利用太阳能制造燃料，这就是光合作用。然而，直接利用光合作用（P/S）制造燃料（生物燃料）的问题是太阳能转化为燃料的效率相当低。然而，如果有可能在初级反应的水平上“挖掘”P/S，那么原则上，更高的能量转换效率是可能的。这就是人工光合作用背后的想法，它使用一种策略，将其分解为4个部分反应。在世界范围内，人们已经做了很多工作来了解光合作用中这四个关键步骤的分子细节。在理解第1步和第2步方面已经取得了很大的进展，事实上，现在有许多人工反应中心和天线模拟物，它们的功能相当好。建立能够利用太阳能制造燃料的系统的主要障碍是我们目前无法生产出能够分解水并使用所产生的还原剂来合成燃料的强大催化剂。该提案的主要目的是致力于生产能够克服这些障碍的新型设备。

The major challenge in the area of renewable energy is devise sustainable ways of making fuels, preferably dense portable fuels that can be used for applications such as aviation. There is one major biochemical/chemical process on Earth that can use solar energy to make fuels and this is photosynthesis. The problem, however, of using photosynthesis (P/S) directly to make fuels (biofuels) is the rather low efficiency of conversion of solar energy into fuel. However, if it were possible to 'tap into' P/S at the level of the primary reactions then, in principle, higher energy conversion efficiencies are possible. This is the idea behind the drive for artificial photosynthesis using a strategy that breaks it down into 4 partial reactions. Worldwide there has been a lot of work designed to understand the molecular details of these key four steps in photosynthesis . There has been excellent progress in understanding steps 1 and 2, indeed there are now many artificial reaction centre and antenna mimics that function rather well. The major barriers to building systems capable of using solar energy to make fuels are our current inability to produce robust catalysts that can split water and use the reductant produced to synthesise a fuel. The main aims of this proposal are to work towards the production of novel devices that can overcome these barriers.