Emily A. Carter, Arthur W. Marks ’19, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Applied and Computational Mathematics.

Our dependence on fossil fuels threatens our very survival on the planet. Our survival is at risk because of the unavoidable production of CO_2 when such fuels are burned, which in turn contributes to global warming. This project concerns the ultimate clean, renewable, non-CO_2-producing energy resource: the sun. Solar energy can be used for three purposes: (i) somewhat trivially for heat, by focusing the sun’s rays onto absorbing media; (ii) to product liquid fuels via ‘photocatalysis’; and (iii) to produce electricity via ‘photovoltaics’. We will use state-of-the-art quantum mechanics methods to optimize properties of novel bio-inspired inorganic materials with the aim to improve the efficiency level~20%. The same strategy will be used to optimize bio-inspired catalysts to produce H_2 and other fuels. The goal is to find combinations of metals and oxygen that are inexpensive and efficient, which will be of primary concern for any mass production and use later on. This is in contrast to, e.g., proposed Ru-based materials that would be very expensive to produce or dye/TiO_2 photocatalysts with very low efficiency.