Can We Harness Light Like Nature for a New Era of Green Chemistry? (phys.org) 30
Sunlight becomes energy when plants convert four photons of light. But unfortunately, most attempts at synthetic light-absorbing chemicals can only absorb one photon at a time, write two researchers from the University of Melbourne.
"In the Polyzos research group at the School of Chemistry, we have developed a new class of photocatalysts that, like plants, can absorb energy from multiple photons."
This breakthrough allows us to harness light energy more effectively, driving challenging and energy-demanding chemical reactions.
We have applied this technology to generate carbanions — negatively charged carbon atoms that serve as crucial building blocks in the creation, or synthesis, of carbon- and hydrogen-rich chemicals known as organic chemicals. Carbanions are vital in making drugs, polymers and many other important materials. However, traditional methods to produce carbanions often require lots of energy and dangerous reagents, and generate significant chemical waste, posing environmental and safety challenges... Our new method offers a greener, safer alternative [using visible light and renewable starting materials]...
We've used it to synthesize important drug molecules, including antihistamines, in a single step using simple, cheap and commonly available "commodity chemicals" — amines and alkenes. And importantly, the reaction scales well in commercial-scale continuous flow reactors, highlighting its potential for industrial applications.
"By learning from the subtle mastery of photosynthesis," the researchers write, their group "is forging a new paradigm for chemical manufacturing — one where sunlight powers sustainable and elegant solutions for the molecules that shape our world."
We have applied this technology to generate carbanions — negatively charged carbon atoms that serve as crucial building blocks in the creation, or synthesis, of carbon- and hydrogen-rich chemicals known as organic chemicals. Carbanions are vital in making drugs, polymers and many other important materials. However, traditional methods to produce carbanions often require lots of energy and dangerous reagents, and generate significant chemical waste, posing environmental and safety challenges... Our new method offers a greener, safer alternative [using visible light and renewable starting materials]...
We've used it to synthesize important drug molecules, including antihistamines, in a single step using simple, cheap and commonly available "commodity chemicals" — amines and alkenes. And importantly, the reaction scales well in commercial-scale continuous flow reactors, highlighting its potential for industrial applications.
"By learning from the subtle mastery of photosynthesis," the researchers write, their group "is forging a new paradigm for chemical manufacturing — one where sunlight powers sustainable and elegant solutions for the molecules that shape our world."
Go Ahead (Score:2)
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Photosynthesis in one of the most deeply amazing processes in the known universe, verging on magical. Plants just know a whole lot more about quantum mechanics than we do. If we do ever catch up with the plants then we will be looking at niceties like 90% efficient solar panels, among other things.
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We already have such solar panels. They are called "plants". Amazing things that will self replicate under the right conditions and make all the fuel we want. What's even cooler about them is that they can make it in the form that people can consume directly, or where we can use other amazing little bio-factories to turn it into fuel for machines! And no matter how we use that fuel, by using it so created we make it into a closed cycle where no new CO2 is emitted.
Amazing, huh? Fuel we can use in exist
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Like to post trash on the internet huh? Please charge a battery with your box of plants.
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I do it every day. So do you. Chances are wherever you live a biofuel or some sort of ethanol blended conventional fuel is being used to generate electricity. It's an almost certainty your car is running on an ethanol blend, so every time you plug your device in your car that's what you're doing. Already 10% of the entirety of North America's gasoline supply is ethanol.
Who cares how much CO2 is being emitted if 100% of it was captured CO2 to begin with.
So stop fucking around with techy techy that might
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90% efficient panels? Photosynthesis is highly inefficient.
To convert to energy it's typically under 6%.
Nearly half the light falls outside the visible spectrum, which isn't used by plants (photosynthesis only works between 400-700nm). And those higher energy photons must be converted to lower energy photons as the actual conversion requires 700nm photons. And there's a good chance the photons hit the wrong part of the leaf, so by the time you get to the actual conversion you've lost 70% of the light energy
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Conversion from electrical to chemical energy is commonly more than 90% efficient these days. It is no more necessary to emulate the chemical paths of plants than it is to put flapping wings on jet planes. The conversion of interest is photons to electricity. New research suggests that plants do that step with nearly 100% efficiency. Nearly every photon of light absorbed generates an electron. [phys.org]
I could go on to speculate about whether such absorption paths could be developed at other frequencies, to fill in t
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Photosynthesis really is the most efficient chemical factory we know of turning light water and carbon dioxide into energy and structure with virtually no waste.
I have doubts on the efficiency of natural photosynthesis given how little of that sunlight ends up as useful for energy. I guess it might not help much in that the most popular means to extract mechanical energy from plant material is to ferment plant sugars and starches into alcohol. How does just burning plant material for heat compare in getting the sunlight out as something useful? We could possibly turn as much as 50% of the heat into electricity, and once as electricity that gives us convenient me
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But you miss the point that we don't have to get rid of every last ICE to save the world from global warming.
There will always be a few selfish people, we just have to tax them so they pay to remove more carbon than they generate.
It is high time governments put these taxes in place, but of course that will be unpopular among the stupid people, so is not happening.
Whether civilization survive comes down to whether there are more c
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But you miss the point that we don't have to get rid of every last ICE to save the world from global warming.
That's the impression I'm getting with any mention of PHEVs. The claim would be that even the use of an ICE to allow a PHEV to burn hydrocarbons on long trips, the occasional power outage, forgetful moment to plug in at night, in severe weather, or whatever might leave a PHEV not running in all electric mode somehow negates the value of driving something like 90% of its miles on all battery power. We have a shortage of batteries and we could do a lot more to reduce CO2 emissions with the limited battery s
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Efficiency isn't all that important for most solar applications. There is plenty of sunlight, and plenty of unused space to harvest it.
It always comes back to cost, and solar PV is the cheapest form of energy production going. Even for their target application of creating medicines, they are competing against PV+battery so it needs to be extremely cheap.
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Efficiency isn't all that important for most solar applications. There is plenty of sunlight, and plenty of unused space to harvest it.
The cost of solar power is going to be almost all upfront, that being land, labor, materials, interest on loans, and perhaps more. If this is about rooftop solar where the space for the solar panels is defined by the roof than anything then maybe that holds true. For utility scale solar I expect efficiency to have more influence.
While at university I was in the club that built solar powered cars for competition, and I can assure you that efficiency of the solar cells was a huge factor on winning or losing
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What is cheaper than solar? Even solar plus battery?
That first sentence hurts my brain (Score:2, Insightful)
Whomever wrote that should be shot... from a cannon into the sun.
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Must this use light? (Score:1)
The fine article goes into how this can produce many valued chemicals but I would like to know if this process must use light, can it use energy of a different sort? Such as heat or electric current?
I'm sure people will jump into this believing we'd use this process for solar powered chemical factories but I doubt it. If this is to be a viable process for mass production then I doubt people will tolerate the chemical production limited to only when the sun shines. We know how to produce cheap heat 24/7/3
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Remember what they did when we tried to communicate privately, as is our God-given right and codified in the Fourth Amendment.
Phil Zimmerman basically saved the entire privacy and e-commerce spaces by himself and gets too little credit.
Politicians in 1990 would have called today's Amazon "military weapons". Like the DES t-shirts.
Also honorable mention to Ron Rivest who showed the folly of it all. Kids today will never know how insane it got.
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How might governments respond to a technology that allows production of drugs in a garage or spare bedroom ....
That's exactly what a lot of meth labs are. One attempted solution is to try to control the supply of precursors, but if the precursors could also be synthesized easily, that would be different.
I was also reminded of "Dechlorinating the Moderator" for some reason. This is a short story set about 30 years in the future where amateur nuclear engineers were building their own nuclear reactors to produce power or to experiment with particle physics.
The distant future year of 2018. The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson, describes a world based on molecular-level synthesis and cheap energy. Their home synthesizers have filters that try to prevent obvious risks like printing explosives.
Freeman Dyson used to talk about... (Score:3)
something somewhat related. When people asked him about the future, he used to predict that biotech would likely follow the path computing had taken... that it started as an extremely expensive activity of governments and other big institutions, but eventually the tools would shrink and become inexpensive and individuals would be able to hack away at the stuff, bringing in a wave of creativity and economic activity that nobody could predict (Here [youtube.com] is a bit of him mentioning the idea he expounded upon more elsewhere). As I said, it's not the same thing, but I think he would have probably similarly seen a future with a lot more chemical engineering as well, and that activity also becoming small and affordable and eventually in the hands of hobbyists and entrepreneurs.
We mostly tend to focus on all the badness in the world and presume things will always get worse, but if one takes an optimistic look, and considers what the world did with computing, it's quite possible some really neat stuff could happen in these other fields. At this point, I think I would advise kids today to consider an education that INCLUDED computer stuff, but actually focused on chemical or bio stuff.
They Should Plug the Safety Factor First (Score:2)
The current era where being green is considered woke an undesirable, the authors should not sell their invention as "a greener, safer alternative" but instead as "a safer, greener alternative."
We will make these chemicals anyway, regardless of their green nature, because we need them. It is therefore best to plug the safety enhancement first (and potential production increase) with the added side benefit of being greener. This will attract industry attention faster, especially if the safety increases lead t
Betteridges Law (Score:2)
Applies because this civilistation will be toast before we come close to this goal.
we have under 2 decades, to correct a course thats 3 decades into its overdraft .
Making drugs? (Score:2)
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Why? We've translated lots of technology into making drugs. You used to make insulin by grinding up cow and pig pancreases. Now we mostly have big vats of e. coli that we've engineered to pump it out.
Drugs are a great application for new chemistry techniques because they tend to be complicated, hard to synthesize, but valuable enough that any improvement can be a big deal.
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Um... random review paper:
Photochemistry in Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology [acs.org]
What? (Score:2)
I'm stuck at the first sentence. What?