Publication date: 15th December 2025
The transition to a sustainable energy matrix faces significant challenges, such as grid instability due to the intermittency of renewable sources. While green hydrogen is pivotal for decarbonizing the chemical industry, direct solar-to-chemical conversion offers a compelling, albeit underestimated, alternative pathway to valorize abundant solar energy. This presentation posits that Poly(heptazine imide) (PHI), a class of ionic, crystalline carbon nitride semiconductors, can bridge the gap between solar harvesting and chemical synthesis. By leveraging a cation exchange strategy, we demonstrate how metal Single-Atom Catalysts (SACs)—such as Fe, Ni, and Mn—can be stabilized within the PHI framework to create precise active sites and tune band structures.
Here, a series of recent examples are presented, demonstrating that these tailored photocatalysts can be successfully employed to drive the synthesis of commodity chemicals. First, we address the production of Green Hydrogen, showing that Nickel-based PHI catalysts (Ni-PHI) can effectively replace costly platinum, challenging the economic feasibility barriers of conventional photocatalysis. Second, we illustrate the versatility of these materials in organic synthesis through the selective photoreduction of phenylacetylene to styrene under mild conditions. Finally, we report on the sustainable production of hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) using H-PHI and Na-PHI, utilizing glycerol as a sacrificial reagent. These examples collectively demonstrate that single-atom functionalized carbon nitrides can drive a "solar-to-chemical" industry, offering a disruptive solution to safeguard the transition toward a low-carbon economy.
This research was financially supported by the Brazilians funding agencies CAPES, CNPq (403064/2021 and 405752/2022), FAPESP (2020/14741-6, 2021/11162-8, 2024/00839-5 and 2021/12394-0) and FINEP (01.23.0645.00 and 01.23.0662.00).
nanoGe is a prestigious brand of successful science conferences that are developed along the year in different areas of the world since 2009. Our worldwide conferences cover cutting-edge materials topics like perovskite solar cells, photovoltaics, optoelectronics, solar fuel conversion, surface science, catalysis and two-dimensional materials, among many others.
Previously nanoGe Spring Meeting (NSM) and nanoGe Fall Meeting (NFM), MATSUS is a multiple symposia conference focused on a broad set of topics of advanced materials preparation, their fundamental properties, and their applications, in fields such as renewable energy, photovoltaics, lighting, semiconductor quantum dots, 2-D materials synthesis, charge carriers dynamics, microscopy and spectroscopy semiconductors fundamentals, etc.
International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics
International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV) is celebrated yearly in May. The main topics are the development, function and modeling of materials and devices for hybrid and organic solar cells. The field is now dominated by perovskite solar cells but also other hybrid technologies, as organic solar cells, quantum dot solar cells, and dye-sensitized solar cells and their integration into devices for photoelectrochemical solar fuel production.
Asia-Pacific International Conference on Perovskite, Organic Photovoltaics and Optoelectronics
The main topics of the Asia-Pacific International Conference on Perovskite, Organic Photovoltaics and Optoelectronics (IPEROP) are discussed every year in Asia-Pacific for gathering the recent advances in the fields of material preparation, modeling and fabrication of perovskite and hybrid and organic materials. Photovoltaic devices are analyzed from fundamental physics and materials properties to a broad set of applications. The conference also covers the developments of perovskite optoelectronics, including light-emitting diodes, lasers, optical devices, nanophotonics, nonlinear optical properties, colloidal nanostructures, photophysics and light-matter coupling.
The International Conference on Perovskite Thin Film Photovoltaics Perovskite Photonics and Optoelectronics (NIPHO) is the best place to hear the latest developments in perovskite solar cells as well as on recent advances in the fields of perovskite light-emitting diodes, lasers, optical devices, nanophotonics, nonlinear optical properties, colloidal nanostructures, photophysics and light-matter coupling.