PhotoElectroFlow · Design of Flow-Photoelectrolyzer

The EU strongly strives for a sustainability transformation, and the EU Commission's Green Deal accelerates climate neutrality by 2050, with a modern and competitive economy. Climate neutrality of the chemical industries calls for innovative resource- and energy-economical technologies to harvest renewable forms of energy and prevent chemical waste. Breakthrough studies demonstrated the unique potential of harnessing both solar and electrical energy for sustainable syntheses. Thereby, chemical waste formation can be minimized, while enabling innovative scenarios that neither electrochemistry nor photochemistry can achieve. Specifically, the merger of photoelectrochemically-enabled molecular assembly with the cathodic hydrogen formation constitutes ideal resource-economic synthesis. Unfortunately, photoelectrocatalysis continues to be limited to reactions on small mmol lab-scale, preventing the translation of recent exciting trends to the next level of industrial process scale. The absence of a commercially available reactor represents a major limitation to unleash the full potential of photoelectrochemical chemistry for practitioners. The transfer to continuous flow bears great opportunities for photoelectrochemistry in chemical, agrochemical and pharmaceutical industries. The overarching objective of PhotoElectroFlow is to devise a first continuous flow electrolyzer for scalable photoelectrochemical transformations in a safe and robust manner on gram to kilogram scale. Thus, we will provide a most-user-friendly technology, closely collaborating with partners in industry, to harvest the unique synergy of light and electricity. Evaluation of the PhotoElectroFlow electrolyzer will be benchmarked in molecular transformations of practical importance to chemists in academia as well as in pharmaceutical, agrochemical and chemical industries. The devise will be patented and represents the foundation for a start-up initiative towards circular carbon-neutral industries.