AC Kolloquium - Professor Dr. Charles W. Machan

Metal-Free Molecules as Electrocatalysts and Co-electrocatalysts

There is continuously expanding interest in developing new electrocatalytic processes as an approach to harness intermittent electricity from renewable sources. Molecular systems are useful to understand and develop fundamental principles of these reactions through mechanistic study, as well as offer the possibility for testing structure-function relationships through iterative synthetic design. Broadly, the fundamental understanding of molecular species as electrocatalysts has relevance to the interconversion of electricity and chemical energy, as well as commodity chemical production. However, in order for homogeneous systems to eventually be scalable, their activity and stability must be improved. In naturally occurring enzymes, redox equivalents (electrons, often in a concerted manner with protons) are delivered to enzyme active sites by small molecules known as redox mediators (RMs).