Photochemical Hydrogen Storage with Hexaazatrinaphthylene

Climate warming and instabilities of fossil fuels supply make hydrogen a very desired energy carrier of the future. However, although a huge effort was devoted to development of hydrogen generation and storage methods, the current hydrogen technologies have still significant drawbacks. In the seminar an alternative approach to hydrogen generation and storage will be presented, with Proton-Coupled Electron Transfer (PCET), a process ubiquitous in nature that underpins energy conversion in chemistry and biology, as an engine of energy conversion. It will be shown that using Hexaazatrinaphthylene (HATN) as the photocatalyst, hydrogen atom can be abstracted from an alcohol molecule and stored on HATN. In this photochemical process, the energy of the absorbed photon is converted into the chemical energy of photoproducts.