A new class of materials called sulphide perovskites could turn sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide directly into hydrogen fuel and useful chemicals, mimicking the way natural enzymes work. Current methods for producing green hydrogen are too expensive and inefficient for widespread use. Storing hydrogen long-term—for example, to power industry through winter—remains a major challenge. This project tackles both problems by designing photocatalysts that absorb visible light (not just ultraviolet) and drive three key chemical reactions: splitting water to make hydrogen, converting that hydrogen into ammonia for easy storage, and using the hydrogen to turn CO₂ into valuable chemical feedstocks. The researchers take inspiration from metallo-sulphur cluster enzymes found in nature, which perform similar transformations, and from high-performance photovoltaic materials. If successful, the work could deliver efficiency breakthroughs that make solar-driven fuel production commercially viable. That would directly affect energy grids, industrial supply chains, and chemical manufacturing—systems that currently rely on fossil fuels. The project also uses Bayesian optimisation to accelerate material discovery, meaning fewer experiments are needed to find the best catalyst. This is fundamental science with a clear practical target: cost-effective, seasonal energy storage and a circular carbon economy.
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The implementation of the European Green Deal is one of the highest priorities and biggest challenges of the European Union today. Accelerating the decarbonisation of our economy requires the cost-effective generation of green hydrogen, large-scale and long-term (seasonal) hydrogen storage solutions and the development of new ways to utilise hydrogen as a chemical feedstock. PHOTOCAT3.0 will address these challenges by pioneering the development of next-generation sulphide perovskite photocatalysts that efficiently produce green hydrogen, store it in form of ammonia and utilise it in the synthesis of chemicals from CO2 These next-gen photocatalysts will excel in light-harvesting across the visible light spectrum as well as in the selective breaking and making of chemical bonds targeting high-value products. For the design of the photocatalysts, this project takes inspiration from nature's approach to tackling some of the same chemical transformations with metallo-sulphur cluster-containing enzymes (hydrogenase, nitrogenase and carbon monoxide and formate dehydrogenases), and, on the other hand, from high-performant photovoltaic materials such as copper indium gallium sulphides and selenides and lead halide perovskites. The objectives of PHOTOCAT3.0 are i) to pioneer the development of low-temperature atomic layer deposition routes to highquality highly defined sulphide perovskite photocatalysts, ii) to establish an unprecedented understanding of optoelectronic and surface catalytic properties of this emerging class of materials through advanced characterisation techniques, iii) to benchmark their performance in photocatalytic transformations of small molecules with enormous economic and environmental importance and iv) to accelerate material discovery using Bayesian optimisation to predict optimum catalytic performance from a minimum set of experiments and samples. This approach will produce the urgently needed efficiency breakthroughs of photocatalytic systems.
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