A multi-Institutional team from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi, IIT Delhi and Yogi Vemana University have replicated the structure of a leaf in a low cost inorganic catalyst to enable light-induced production of green hydrogen and ammonia.
The team, led by IIT Mandi Professor Dr Venkata Krishnan, have published their findings in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.
The article is co-authored by his research scholar, Dr Ashish Kumar from IIT Mandi and the other authors are his collaborators, Dr Saswata Bhattacharya and Manish Kumar from IIT Delhi, and Dr Navakoteswara Rao, and Prof MV Shankar from Yogi Vemana University, Andhra Pradesh.
IIT Mandi said the possibility of using sunlight to produce chemicals, as plants do in photosynthesis, was pointed out by an American chemist named Giacomo Ciamician in 1912.
“This challenge was met in the 1970's with researchers showing the possibility of harvesting the sun's light energy to produce chemicals through the use of special light-activated materials called photocatalysts...since then, many photocatalysts have been discovered to bring about light-enabled reactions for various purposes, and studies are ongoing in many areas of photochemical synthesis to discover new photocatalysts and improve existing ones for better performance,” IIT Mandi said.
“We have been interested in improving the efficiency of photocatalytic processes for the production of hydrogen and ammonia, because these two substances are industrially important,” said Dr Krishnan, the lead researcher.
Hydrogen is a source of green energy and ammonia is the backbone of the fertilizer industry, the institute said.
The available methods for production of these consume large amounts of energy in the form of heat and also release greenhouse gases, IIT Mandi said.
Using photosynthesis to produce hydrogen and ammonia will save energy and costs, and will have significant environmental benefits, it added.
“We were inspired by the light-harvesting mechanism of leaves and replicated the surface and internal three-dimensional microstructures of the leaf of the Peepul tree in the calcium titanate to enhance the light-harvesting properties,” said the lead researcher.
Dr Krishnan expects that their work would provide a direction for the smart design of defect-engineered three-dimensional photocatalysts for green energy and environment-oriented applications.