Damrauer

Light-powered reactions could make the chemical manufacturing industry more energy-efficient

Daniel Morton — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 22:25:34 +0000

Light-powered reactions could make the chemical manufacturing industry more energy-efficient Daniel Morton Thu, 06/26/2025 - 16:25

Daniel Morton

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The Conversation Highlight

SuPRCat

Research Article

A recent collaborative report, published in Science, including RASEI Fellow Niels Damrauer, addresses a key issue for light-driven chemistry, potentially opening up possibilities for future energy-efficient chemical manufacturing.

Chemical reactions typically require an input of energy to proceed, this can be through heating, or introduction of chemical energy in the form of reactive chemicals. Recently, light-driven chemistry has emerged as a more energy efficient alternative. The principle is to use energy from light, which is absorbed by a catalyst. Excited by the light energy the catalyst can then donate an electron to the chemicals undergoing the desired chemical transformation.

This sounds great – light-driven reactions? One of the key issues in this class of chemistry is back transfer of the electron. This means that after the catalyst donates the electron to the reagents, instead of doing the desired reaction, the reagent gives the electron back to the catalyst. This can significantly slow down the desired reaction, even sometimes shutting it down.

This report details a new type of catalyst that can overcome this back transfer of electrons. Through rationale design of the catalyst the new system uses a chemical reaction as a catch, preventing the back transfer from the reagent and strongly favoring the desired reaction.

To highlight the impact of this work, which was completed as part of the NSF Center for Chemical Innovation Center for Sustainable Photoredox Catalysis (SuPRCat), ��ɫ��Ƶ student Arindam Sau, a member of the Damrauer group, teamed up with a graduate student and postdoc from Colorado State University to put together a review and summary of this work that was recently published in The Conversation. Check out the highlight to get a full picture of the impact of this work.

June 2025

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Unfiltered Broadband Probes Can Obscure Long Time Dynamics in Populations Engaged in Second-Order Processes Including Annihilation

Daniel Morton — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 22:52:55 +0000

Unfiltered Broadband Probes Can Obscure Long Time Dynamics in Populations Engaged in Second-Order Processes Including Annihilation Daniel Morton Mon, 03/03/2025 - 15:52

THE JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY LETTERS, 2025, 16, 2522-2528

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Catalyzing the Sustainable Decomposition of PFAS Forever Chemicals

Daniel Morton — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 00:30:44 +0000

Catalyzing the Sustainable Decomposition of PFAS Forever Chemicals Daniel Morton Fri, 12/20/2024 - 17:30

Daniel Morton

RASEI Fellow Niels Damrauer is part of a collaborative team that have developed a new light-driven C-F activation reaction, one that has the potential to help dismantle PFAS ‘forever chemicals’

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Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are synthetic compounds that have found widespread use in consumer products and industrial applications. Their water and grease resistant properties have been part of their attraction in their applications, but these are also the reason that they are now found practically everywhere in the environment, they are very difficult to decompose.

While many chemicals will decompose relatively quickly, studies have shown that PFAS are expected to stick around for up to 1000 years. While this durability is great in something like firefighting foams or non-stick cookware, it is not great when these compounds get into the environment.

This new article, published in Nature in November of 2024, describes the work of a collaborative team of theoretical and experimental chemists, who have developed a new photochemical reaction that could hold promise of speeding up the decomposition of PFAS. A recent highlight of this work, written by the graduate student and postdoctoral fellows who did the research, appeared in The Conversation.

Using a photocatalyst, that absorbs light to speed up a reaction, the researchers were able to ‘activate’ one of the carbon-fluorine bonds, one of the strongest bonds in organic chemistry. The photocatalyst absorbs light, transfers electrons to the fluorine containing molecules, which then breaks down the sturdy carbon-fluorine bond.

While this doesn’t decompose the whole molecule, it is essentially like finding a chink in the armor, it opens the door to degradation of the PFAS to harmless smaller molecules.