Organic-inorganic hybrid microporous polymeric nanocomposites for the photoreduction of CO2-Applications in environment and energy technologies

The increasing global energy demand is not only accelerating the depletion of fossil fuels, but is also gradually increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. This phenomena is seriously impacting the overall carbon cycle balance, which in turn is resulting in serious greenhouse effects. Developing effective strategies to address the global energy challenges and finding new ways to reduce deleterious CO2 emissions has, therefore, become one of the most serious and urgent issues for the human race. Currently, huge emphasis is being placed on search for abundant and clean sources of energy while capturing and safely storing the emitted CO2 to mitigate its harmful environmental impacts. Sun is one of the most abundant, inexhaustible and clean source of energy. The solar radiations falling on the earths surface in an hour is about 1.5 *105 TW, which is more than the total global energy consumption in a year (about 16.9 TW in 2016). Currently, two major strategies are being extensively explored for solar energy harvesting i.e., photovoltaic or solar cells that directly convert solar energy into electricity, and the photocatalytic systems which transform solar energy into useful chemical energy (photo-splitting of water and photoreduction CO2). Despite significant development in solar cell technology, it is still facing several formidable challenges including high cost, low photon capture efficiency and low output energy density. Photocatalysis has great potential to convert solar energy into useful chemical energy by transforming CO2 to useful energy materials, and thus offers an attractive alternative to our future energy securities. Through this route, well not only be able to solve our ensuing energy crisis but also effectively utilize captured CO2 from atmosphere that is seriously threatening the existence of our future generations. This proposal aims to synthesize highly effective photocatalysts for converting CO2 to useful organic compounds. For this purpose, a series of microporous organic polymers will be synthesized to combine with suitable metal nanoparticles and the effectiveness of catalysts will be evaluated towards the photocatalytic reduction of CO2 to make useful chemicals. The investigators have a long history of effective collaboration with complementary research expertize that would be very useful for the successful implementation of the project.