UIC Researchers report the photoreduction of CO2 using MOFs
The Glusac Group recently published a paper in Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters on the photoreduction of CO2 using MOFs as the photocatalyst. This publication is a result of a collaboration with researchers from UIC (Xin Zheng, Matthew Drummer, Varun Singh, Igor Bolotin, Ksenija Glusac), Northwestern University (Thomas Rayder, Nicholas Weingartz, Boris Kramar, Joseph Hupp, Omar Farha, Lin Chen), Valparaiso University (Haiying He), and Argonne National Laboratory (Oleg Poluektov, Jens Niklas, Peter Zapol). This paper reports the photo-redox mechanism through which the PCN-136 MOF reduces CO2. This is done through a photoreactive capture method in which the zirconium nodes first capture CO2, through a bicarbonate intermediate, followed by electron transfer from the photoexcited ligands producing formate. This work is the first of its kind in the Glusac Group and provides much insight into the engineering of MOFs for photocatalytic CO2 reduction.
Read all about it here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jpclett.3c00049