Motivation: Our current demand for energy is large, and we will need even more of it in the future. Fossil fuels are not a good solution to our demands for two main reasons: (i) the fuel reserves will dry out in several hundreds of years and (ii) the build-up of atmospheric carbon-dioxide produced from fuel causes global warming and represents a serious environmental problem. As an alternative source of energy, we could use the light from the Sun. The amount of solar radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface in only one hour gives enough power to satisfy our energy demands for a whole year. One approach to harvesting Sun's energy is via Solar fuel cells (split water into oxygen and hydrogen using sulight, then use these gases in a fuel cell when and where electricity is needed).

Our approach: We are interested in catalysts for oxidation of water to form molecular oxygen. In this area, our group recently discovered a fully organic, flavin-based catalyst (Et-Fl+) for the oxidation of water to oxygen. Using electrochemical techniques (cyclic voltammetry, RRDE experiment, bulk electrolysis), we found that catalytic water oxidation occurs at a large overpotential (+1.9 V vs. NHE), with a turnover number of ~13. We are currently investigating the mechanism of catalysis by flavinium ion and we are analyzing other iminium ions for potential catalytic behavior. Techiniques we use for our research are:


    • synthesis of model compounds
    • electrochemical measurements
    • femtosecond pump-probe laser experiments.

Relevant Publications:


Funding