Mercredi 24 novembre 2010 à 11 h 00 – À l’invitation d’Isabelle Gillaizeau

« Photosynthèse artificielle : synthèse et évaluation de nouveaux (photo)nanocatalyseurs pour la (photo)électrolyse de l’eau »

Professeur Marc Fontecave

Laboratoire de Chimie et Biologie des Métaux (LCBM)
CNRS UMR 5249
CEA, DSV/iRTSV
17 avenue des Martyrs
38054 Grenoble cedex 9

Collège de France
11 place Marcelin Berthelot
75231 Paris cedex 05

One of the grand challenges of twenty-first century chemistry is to convert abundant energy-poor molecules to energy rich molecules using sunlight as the energy source. Hydrogen from water is such a solar fuel. However its production and use currently depend on noble metals such as Platinum which is expensive and not abundant enough. Viable renewable energy systems will require new catalysts made from earth-abundant materials, cheap and robust. We will describe recent results, partly based on a bioinspired strategy, aiming at reproducing hydrogenase active sites, which leads to Cobalt- and Nickel-based molecular (photo)catalysts for hydrogen production, with remarkable properties (good catalytic efficiency, high stability, small overpotentials,…). These compounds can be readily grafted on electrodes for applications as (photo)cathodes in photoelectrochemical cells to achieve light-dependent splitting of water into oxygen and hydrogen.