Nanocapsules for Artificial Photosynthesis?
From Chemie.de:
Imitating photosynthesis in plants? If we were to accomplish this, mankind would have a little less to worry about. Chemists from the University of Würzburg have now made progress on the road to achieving artificial photosynthesis.
The structure that has been developed in the university’s Organic Chemistry laboratory is fascinatingly complex: thousands of similar molecules are packed together to create a capsule that is filled with molecules of a different kind. The diameter of one capsule is a mere 20 to 50 nanometers, which is one ten-thousandth of a pinhead.
Structures that are so elaborate are far from the ordinary in chemistry. So, it is hardly surprising that these Würzburg nanocapsules appear on the front page of the November issue of the journal “Nature Chemistry”. What is more, they can also do something that has not been described before for chemically synthesized molecules.
Nanocapsules possess a property that is important in photosynthesis in plants: the molecules inside the capsule absorb light energy and emit some of this again in the form of fluorescent light. The rest of it, however, is transmitted by energy transfer to the capsule molecules, which then also cast fluorescent light.
As far as photosynthesis is concerned nothing different happens, to put it simply: molecules harness energy from sunlight and transmit it to other molecules in a complex process, at the end of which the energy is bound chemically. The sun’s power then sits in valuable carbohydrates that plants, animals, and people use to generate the energy they need to live.
In principle, therefore, the nanocapsules should make suitable components for an artificial photosynthesis contraption. “They would even use the light far more efficiently than plants because their synthetic bilayer membranes would be composed entirely of photoactive material,” says Professor Frank Würthner.