Oct
6
New Synthetic Enzyme Design Splits Water For Hydrogen
October 6, 2022 | Leave a Comment
The team’s research paper has been published in Nature Catalysis.
Hydrogen is considered by some as a promising alternative to fossil fuels. It can be produced from water using electricity. If the electricity comes from renewable sources, it is called green hydrogen. But it would be even more sustainable if hydrogen could be produced directly with the energy of sunlight.
In nature, light-driven water splitting takes place during photosynthesis in plants. Plants use a complex molecular apparatus for this, the so-called photosystem II. Mimicking its active center is a promising strategy for realizing the sustainable production of hydrogen. A team led by Professor Frank Würthner at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and the Center for Nanosystems Chemistry at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) is working on this.
Enzyme-like water preorganization in front of a Ruthenium water oxidation catalyst. Image Credit: Team Würthner, University of Würzburg.
Water (H2O) consists of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms. The first step of water splitting is a challenge: to release the hydrogen, the oxygen must be removed from two water molecules. To do this, it is first necessary to remove four electrons and four protons from the two water molecules.
This oxidative reaction is not at all easily done. Plants use a complex structure to catalyze this process, consisting of a cluster with four manganese atoms over which the electrons can spread.
Würthner’s team has developed a similar solution within their first breakthrough published in the journals Nature Chemistry and Energy & Environmental Science in 2016 and 2017, a kind of “artificial enzyme” that can manage the first step of water splitting.
This water oxidation catalyst, which consists of three Ruthenium centers interacting in a macrocyclic architecture, successfully catalyses the thermodynamically-demanding process of water oxidation.
Now the chemists at JMU have succeeded in making the sophisticated reaction take place efficiently on a single ruthenium center. In the process, they have even achieved similarly high catalytic activities as in the natural model, the photosynthetic apparatus of plants.
Professor Würthner credited his student, “This success was made possible because our doctoral student Niklas Noll created an artificial pocket around the Ruthenium catalyst. Therein, the water molecules for the desired proton-coupled electron transfer are arranged in front of the ruthenium center in a precisely defined arrangement, similar to what happens in enzymes.”
The long-term goal of the Würzburg group is to integrate the water oxidation catalyst into an artificial device that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen with the powered by sunlight. The effort will take some time, as the catalyst must be coupled with other components to form a functioning overall system – with light-harvesting dyes and with so-called reduction catalysts.
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This is major progress. It could be part of a foundation for a system harvesting hydrogen from water, carbon from CO2, combining them into say propane, that could run all year fueling a warm home during the winter. The effluent would be, well, water and recycled CO2.
Humanity would be doing a natural thing with the atmosphere.
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