Catalyst Only Needs Sunlight and Water for Conversion
The Institute for Basic Science (IBS) announced on Dec. 29 that it has developed a photocatalyst converting carbon dioxide into useful hydrocarbon energy in collaboration with the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
Earlier, the IBS developed a monatomic copper-titanium dioxide catalyst as a combination of a copper atom and titanium dioxide nanoparticles and succeeded in producing hydrogen with sunlight and water using the catalyst. This catalyst uses no precious metals and yet showed a considerable improvement in performance.
In the following joint research, the three institutes clarified how the monatomic copper-titanium dioxide photocatalyst interacts with carbon dioxide on an atomic level. Based on the clarified mechanism, they successfully developed the catalyst converting carbon dioxide into a chemical fuel simply with sunlight and water.
They focused on the metal-support interaction between a stabilized copper atom and a titanium dioxide photocatalyst. A metal-support interaction can be defined as a chemical action between a support and a metal catalyst on it. The interaction is essential for an increase in catalytic activity, but precise atomic-level control is not easy.
The institutes discovered that atomic-level metal-support interaction control leads to the generation of an active site where carbon dioxide conversion is efficient. The monatomic copper-titanium dioxide catalyst was designed based on this discovery. As a result, the optimized photocatalyst successfully converted carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon fuels such as methane and ethane at an efficiency level at least 60 times higher than those of existing titanium dioxide photocatalysts.
“In order to achieve carbon neutrality, carbon dioxide conversion into chemical fuels is as important as reducing the use of carbon,” they said, adding, “We are expecting that conversion into ethanol and propanol will also become possible through additional research.” Details of the research are available in the Energy & Environmental Science journal.