Integrated Solar Fuel Generators

With the rapid worldwide increase of interest and excitement about the promise of artificial photosynthesis for renewable fuels, the research community is beginning to focus on the challenges of integrating the various components into complete, unassisted solar fuel generators.

Integrated Solar Fuel Generators discusses the scientific and engineering efforts addressing the challenges of building complete integrated artificial photosystems that will form the basis for developing a solar fuels technology. Building on recent substantial progress towards efficient semiconductor light absorbers and robust, earth abundant heterogeneous catalysts for water oxidation and proton reduction by the community, the integration of these components into efficient durable generators suitable for scale-up moves into focus. To succeed, a broad range of materials, processing, and design issues need to be addressed to meet efficiency, stability and scalability requirements.

This book describes the critical areas of research and development towards viable integrated solar fuels systems, the current state of the art of these efforts and outlines future research needs that will accelerate progress towards a deployable technology.

Ian D Sharp is a Staff Scientist at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, Lawrence Berkeley National Laborator, USA.

Harry A Atwater is the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology, USA.

Hans-Joachim Lewerenz is Department Head for Accelerated Discovery at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, Lawrence Berkeley National Laborator, USA.