MOSCOW, 16 APR — RIA Novosti. Material, allowing more than 20 times to improve the efficiency of production of advanced methanol fuel has been developed by scientists at the National research University “MIET”, together with colleagues from the Lodz technical University (Lodz, Poland). Results published in the journal “Topics in Catalysis”.
the Conversion of carbon dioxide into fuel such as a methanol — effective way of reducing toxic emissions, according to the study authors. The optimal solution, in their opinion, is the use of this renewable energy.
Today, the synthesis of methanol from CO2 is mainly carried out photocatalytic method in which reaction proceeds at the expense of light energy. However, the titanium oxide used as the photocatalyst responds only to ultraviolet light, amounting to only 5% of the sunlight.
to make full use of solar energy, scientists modified the surface of titanium oxide metal nanoparticles. It turned out that the combination of titanium oxide with some metals allows the catalyst to capture energy as the visible spectrum covering most of the solar light.
According to him, for the manufacture of a modified photocatalyst is used either vacuum evaporation of metals and subsequent deposition on the titanium oxide, or the annealing of oxide powder is impregnated with salts of metals.
To investigate the structure of the obtained materials were used x-ray diffraction analysis and scanning electron microscopy. The study was conducted in the framework of the grant RSF №19-000595 aimed at the development of artificial photosynthesis in the visible spectrum.
In the future, the team intends to develop a hybrid photocatalytic system, adapted to operation in the visible spectrum and is able to solve tasks such as the synthesis of organic fuel and water cleaning from organic pollutants and production of hydrogen and oxygen by decomposition of water.
