With the aim of the most massive and efficient use of renewable energies, a team of scientists from the University of Cambridge (England) claim to have built an independent device that can mimic photosynthesis (the process that plants use to convert light energy) and converting sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water into liquid fuel.
The study, published in the journal Nature Energy , describes a new method that allows the production of clean fuel while also being completely wireless. By requiring no electrical input, the researchers believe this carbon-neutral power generation method could be scaled up to produce large amounts of fuel sustainably, and used in the future to produce massive solar farms made up of cells that perform artificial photosynthesis.
At last: artificial photosynthesis
The device is based on advanced “photo sheet” or “photo sheet” technology and converts sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and formic acid, a storable fuel . This type of fuel can be used directly in specially developed generators or by converting it into hydrogen, according to the Cambridge team.
Thus, by using “photographic sheet” technology, which is basically a film containing photocatalysts, the device can use sunlight to convert CO2 and water into oxygen and formic acid. Formic acid can be stored as a liquid or relatively simply converted to hydrogen , which has a wide variety of applications, from industrial processes to space travel.
Previous attempts to create artificial photosynthesis devices generated a lot of waste products and were therefore too inefficient to be useful on a large scale, but the researchers believe that this revolutionary new device is presented as the most hopeful idea. up to now.
It is certainly quite a challenge to produce these clean fuels without unwanted by-products that are expensive and difficult to dispose of.
“It has been difficult to achieve artificial photosynthesis with a high degree of selectivity, so you are converting as much sunlight as possible into the fuel you want, rather than staying with a lot of waste,” explained Qian Wang, co-author of the work.
The objective is clear: “We want to get to the point where we can cleanly produce a liquid fuel that can also be easily stored and transported”, adds Erwin Reisner who in 2019 developed together with his team a solar reactor based on a design of ‘ artificial leaf ‘, which also uses sunlight, carbon dioxide and water to produce a fuel, known as syngas.
The current functional device is only 20 cm2, but experts believe that creating larger cells will not be difficult to create.
While this technology looks promising, it still has a long way to go before it reaches the mass market . One of its handicaps is that the catalyst used in the photographic sheet is based on cobalt , which sadly is not efficient enough to be a viable method of large-scale fuel production. But they are still looking for different options and improving the device, so it will be a matter of time before we talk about artificial photosynthesis again.
Referencia: Qian Wang, Julien Warnan, Santiago Rodríguez-Jiménez, Jane J. Leung, Shafeer Kalathil, Virgil Andrei, Kazunari Domen, Erwin Reisner. Molecularly engineered photocatalyst sheet for scalable solar formate production from carbon dioxide and water. Nature Energy, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41560-020-0678-6
