Purdue researcher helps classify new means of renewable light energy

Jeff Miller
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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue professor Jeff Miller worked with researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles to characterize extremely small titanium dioxide that could help convert visible light into renewable energy.

On its own, titanium dioxide captures ultraviolet light but not visible light, leaving out half of the solar spectrum. UCLA researchers discovered that adding boron oxide to titanium dioxide resulted in nanoparticles capable of absorbing a wider range of light to be transformed for electricity and other energy uses.

Miller’s group helped the researchers to understand how titanium dioxide’s size and structure played a role in its ability to capture visible light.

“When you go to very, very small sizes, it changes the fundamental properties of a particle,” said Miller, a professor in Purdue’s Davidson School of Chemical Engineering. “But the size is what gave titanium its unique properties.”

Findings published on March 5 in Nature Materials. The next steps would be fabricating the modified titanium dioxide into solar arrays to capture and transform light into useful energy.

“Titanium dioxide has always been intensively investigated for solar capture, but it’s never been able to find widespread commercial use because it only captures a small fraction of the light. Now that it can capture a larger fraction of the light, it’s going to be more efficient for the production of solar energy applications,” Miller said. 

Writer: Kayla Wiles, 765-494-2432, wiles5@purdue.edu 

Source: Jeff Miller, 765-496-0462, jeffrey-t-miller@purdue.edu

ABSTRACT

Dahee Jung^1,2, Liban A. M. Saleh¹, Zachariah J. Berkson³, Maher F. El-Kady^1,2, Jee Youn Hwang¹, Nahla Mohamed^1,4, Alex I. Wixtrom¹ , Ekaterina Titarenko¹ , Yanwu Shao¹ , Kassandra McCarthy¹, Jian Guo⁵, Ignacio B. Martini¹, Stephan Kraemer⁶, Evan C. Wegener⁷ , Philippe Saint-Cricq¹, Bastian Ruehle¹, Ryan R. Langeslay⁸, Massimiliano Delferro ⁸, Jonathan L. Brosmer ¹, Christopher H. Hendon⁹, Marcus Gallagher-Jones ^1,2, Jose Rodriguez ^1,2, Karena W. Chapman ¹⁰, Jeffrey T. Miller⁷, Xiangfeng Duan^1,2, Richard B. Kaner^1,2,5, Jeffrey I. Zink^1,2, Bradley F. Chmelka³ and Alexander M. Spokoyny ^1,2* 

¹Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA. ²California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA. ³Department of Chemical Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA. ⁴Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt. ⁵Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA. ⁶Materials Research Center, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA. ⁷Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA. ⁸Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL, USA. ⁹Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA. ¹⁰X-ray Science Division, Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL, USA. 

doi:10.1038/s41563-018-0021-9 

There is significant interest in the development of methods to create hybrid materials that transform capabilities, in particular for Earth-abundant metal oxides, such as TiO₂, to give improved or new properties relevant to a broad spectrum of applications. Here we introduce an approach we refer to as ‘molecular cross-linking’, whereby a hybrid molecular boron oxide material is formed from polyhedral boron-cluster precursors of the type [B₁₂(OH)₁₂]^2–. This new approach is enabled by the inherent robustness of the boron-cluster molecular building block, which is compatible with the harsh thermal and oxidizing conditions that are necessary for the synthesis of many metal oxides. In this work, using a battery of experimental techniques and materials simulation, we show how this material can be interfaced successfully with TiO₂ and other metal oxides to give boron-rich hybrid materials with intriguing photophysical and electrochemical properties.