A group of Professor Tomoko Yoshida of Osaka City University has succeeded in improving the function of a photocatalyst that produces carbon monoxide from carbon dioxide using light energy.Carbon monoxide becomes a raw material for various organic substances by reacting with hydrogen.It is a technology that can be called artificial photosynthesis in the sense that it is the starting point for producing organic matter from carbon dioxide.
The method used this time is to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide by absorbing the energy of sunlight with a semiconductor.A substance that promotes a chemical reaction by absorbing light in this way is called a photocatalyst.It has been found that the addition of fine silver particles to this photocatalyst significantly accelerates the reaction.In particular, it was clarified that carbon monoxide is efficiently generated when silver fine particles are made into a size of about 1 nm (1 nanometer is one billionth of a meter).
In the future, we aim to develop a catalyst to reduce carbon dioxide more efficiently and obtain carbon monoxide.Both the increase in carbon dioxide and the lack of energy are urgently resolved as problems on a human scale, but no definitive solution has been found.Artificial photosynthesis, which may solve both of these problems, will play an increasingly important role in the continuous development of human society.
