Visible Light-Driven Cascade Carbon-Carbon Bond Scission for Organic Transformations and Plastics Recycling.

Significant efforts are devoted to developing artificial photosynthetic systems to produce fuels and chemicals in order to cope with the exacerbating energy and environmental crises in the world now. Nonetheless, the large-scale reactions that are the focus of the artificial photosynthesis community, such as water splitting, are thus far not economically viable, owing to the existing, cheaper alternatives to the gaseous hydrogen and oxygen products. As a potential substitute for water oxidation, here, a unique, visible light-driven oxygenation of carbon-carbon bonds for the selective transformation of 32 unactivated alcohols, mediated by a vanadium photocatalyst under ambient, atmospheric conditions is presented.

New insights into the photocatalytic activity of 3-D core-shell P25@silica nanocomposites: impact of mesoporous coating.

In this report, a three-dimensional (3-D) network of core-shell TiO (P25)-mesoporous SiO (P25@mSiO) nanocomposites was prepared via a controllable surfactant-assisted sol-gel method. The nanocomposites were investigated for photocatalytic reactions of organic dye degradation, water splitting, and CO reduction to understand the roles of the mSiO shell in these photocatalytic reactions. It was found that the mSiO shell accelerates the photodegradation of the organic dye, but dramatically reduces the photocatalytic activity of P25 in water splitting and CO reduction.

Selective photocatalytic C-C bond cleavage under ambient conditions with earth abundant vanadium complexes.

Selective C-C bond cleavage under ambient conditions is a challenging chemical transformation that can be a valuable tool for organic syntheses and macromolecular disassembly. Herein, we show that base metal vanadium photocatalysts can harvest visible light to effect the chemoselective C-C bond cleavage of lignin model compounds under ambient conditions. Lignin, a major aromatic constituent of non-food biomass, is an inexpensive, accessible source of fine chemical feedstocks such as phenols and aryl ethers.

Photodegradation of organic dyes in the presence of [Fe(III)-salen]Cl complex and H2O2 under visible light irradiation.

Photodegradation of persistent organic dyes (Rhodamine B (RhB), Malachite Green Oxalate (MG) and Crystal Violet 10B (CV)) is studied with Fe(III)-salen complex (λ(max) 494 nm), and hydrogen peroxide under visible light irradiation (λ≥400 nm). The complete decolourization of the dyes (60 mg/L each) was achieved in the aqueous medium. The pseudo-first-order degradation rate constants of RhB, MG, CV were found to be 2.