PAIR Seminar by Prof. Iain McCulloch on ‘Harnessing the Sun for Chemistry’
PAIR Seminar Series
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Date
02 Oct 2025
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Organiser
PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research
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Time
14:30 - 16:00
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Venue
Senate Room, M1603, 16/F Li Ka Shing Tower, PolyU (Limited seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis)
Speaker
Prof. Iain McCULLOCH
Enquiry
PolyU Academy for Interdisciplinary Research info.pair@polyu.edu.hk
Summary
Abstract
Green hydrogen, produced from water using renewable energy, is expected to become a prominent future fuel, providing clean, carbon free energy for a wide range of industrial applications. It can also provide complementary energy storage in combination with intermittent solar energy. However, competitive economic solar generated hydrogen production on a large scale remains challenging. One promising approach is photochemical water splitting, using light absorbing nanoparticle semiconductors that can drive redox reactions on their surface. Traditionally, wide bandgap inorganic semiconductors have been used for photocatalytic applications. However, these materials almost exclusively absorb UV light which only carries a small fraction (<5%) of solar energy, limiting their efficiency.
In this presentation, the development of photo-catalysts fabricated from organic semiconductors, chemically tuned to absorb strongly throughout the UV-visible spectrum will be discussed. We demonstrate a larger solar to hydrogen efficiency than traditional inorganic photocatalysts, achieved with organic semiconductor nanoparticles that contain an internal donor/acceptor heterojunction between two organic semiconductors with a type II energy level offset. The donor/acceptor heterojunction greatly improves charge generation within the nanoparticles, which in turn greatly improves their hydrogen production efficiency. We demonstrate a substantial increase in the hydrogen production efficiency by tuning the nanoparticle composition. We also observe that the high efficiency of these nanoparticles originates from their ability to generate exceptionally long-lived reactive charges upon illumination, increasing their likelihood to participate in a photocatalytic reaction. In addition, we will discuss solution-processable, linear conjugated polymers of intrinsic porosity for gas phase carbon dioxide photoreduction. Highlighting the potential of processable polymers of intrinsic porosity for use in the gas phase photoreduction of carbon dioxide towards solar fuels.
Prof. Iain McCULLOCH
Gerhard R. Andlinger '52 Professor in Energy and the Environment
Director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment
Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Princeton University, USA
Visiting Professor of Polymer Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry
University of Oxford, UK
Prof. Iain McCulloch is the Director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment and a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University, as well as holding a Visiting Professor position in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford. He previously held joint appointments as Professor of Chemical Science and Director of KAUST Solar Center at KAUST, as well as a Chair in Polymer Materials in the Chemistry Department at Imperial College. Before joining academia, he spent 18 years managing industrial research groups at Hoechst in the US and Merck in the UK. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the European Academy of Sciences and a Member of Academia Europaea. He is the recipient of the 2022 Royal Society Armourers and Brasiers Prize, the 2020 Blaise Pascal Medal for Materials Science, the Royal Society of Chemistry 2020 Interdisciplinary Prize, 2014 Tilden Medal for Advances in Chemistry and the 2009 Creativity in Industry Prize. His interests are in the design and investigation of organic semiconducting materials.
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