A research team at INRS is developing a promising solution that could improve the conversion of solar energy into fuel, which would represent an important milestone in the move towards a sustainable world based on renewable energy.
Solar energy is obtained by capturing the energy radiated by the Sun using different means. Its incidence for one hour a day on a given point could serve to provide electricity to a large part of the planet, but until now it continues to face several difficulties.
The first is that the amount of solar energy that reaches the Earth is very variable, so the areas closest to the Equator are those that receive the greatest amount of solar rays.
The other major drawback is that it can only be used during the day, which limits the amount of productive hours.
The solution could be batteries, but systems and materials that are not only effective but also economically viable have not yet been developed, although scientists continue to search for solutions, since the amount of energy that is wasted is so enormous that it is worth looking for all possible alternatives for its use.
Solar fuel is a substance that will allow solar energy to be stored and transported, overcoming the variability of this renewable resource and the drawback of its intermittency. However, the conversion of clean energy captured directly from the Sun into fuel has certain limits.
A team from the National Institute for Scientific Research (INRS) has managed to develop a solution that appears to be very promising. The results of the study have recently been published in the journal Nature Communications.
Converting energy into fuel is one of the most promising and innovative applications of metal-organic networks, better known as MOFs. This class of crystalline polymers can absorb photons from sunlight, which could then be used in different technologies.
Photonic energy separates a negatively charged electron from its positively charged hole. If these two charges recombine before participating in the oxidation and reduction reactions, energy is lost, which lowers the overall photocatalytic performance of the system. On the other hand, a rapid recombination of charge carriers in these networks is essential, since it is the most important limitation for their photocatalytic application.
Advantageous homounions
According to Professor Dongling Ma, homojunctions would be able to overcome this limitation inherent to their nature, since, being made of semiconductors of similar composition, such homojunctions attract more and more attention from scientists, thanks to their enormous capacity to promote charge separation.
Dongling Ma, the scientific director of the Laboratory of Nanomaterials Chemistry and Advanced Optical Characterization, explained that they were the first to succeed in synthesizing MOF homojunctions and clarified that the improved charge separation results in a fuel of very high stability and efficiency.
Source: Ecoticias.com The Green newspaper.
