AP Seminar - The Exodus from Fossil Fuels to Solar Fuels: Materials Innovation Leads the Way

Solar fuels directly convert sunlight into transportable fuels and fine chemicals, and are expected to replace fossil fuels in the future. New materials such as photoactive semiconductors, photocatalysts and electrocatalysts will play very important roles in these conversion processes. From the sustainability perspective, solar fuel devices need to be designed to cost-efficiently harvest the solar photons, separate the photogenerated charges and store the charges and the associated free energy in chemical bonds. In this presentation, I will highlight our recent work on the development of 1) high-efficiency and high-stability perovskite solar cells and modules, and 2) nanostructured photocatalysts and electrocatalysts for efficient energy conversion in water splitting and CO₂ reduction. Hybrid structures, nanostructured arrays, heterojunction engineering and low-dimensional materials are used to manage photons, electrons and chemical species to facilitate the conversion processes from sunlight to fuels. The prospects and challenges of solar fuels will also be discussed.