Caltech scientists awarded $20 million to 'Power t...( PASADENA Calif.--In the dreams of Ha...)

PASADENA, Calif.--In the dreams of Harry Gray, Beckman Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, the future energy needs of the world are met with solar-fuel power plants. Now, a $20 million award from the Chemical Bonding Center (CBC), a National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Chemistry program, will help bring this dream one step closer to reality.

In 2005, NSF granted three Phase I CBC awards. Gray formed a group of Caltech and MIT scientists who spent the $1.5 million and three years of Phase I conducting initial research and establishing public outreach plans for their idea.

Of the three Phase I projects, Caltech's is the only one to advance to Phase II, a $20 million, five-year extension. "We have added outstanding investigators from many other institutions to our Caltech-MIT team in order to ramp up our efforts in Phase II of the 21st century grand challenge to make solar fuels using materials made from Earth-abundant elements," says Gray.

In Phase I, the Caltech-MIT alliance, called "Powering the Planet," proposed to develop nanoscale materials to make fuel from sunlight and water. They designed a nanorod-catalyst water splitter that incorporates a membrane to separate the oxygen- and hydrogen-making parts of the system.

Nathan Lewis, Caltech's Argyros Professor and professor of chemistry, and chemist Bruce Brunschwig, a Member of Caltech's Beckman Institute (BI) and Director of the Materials Resource Center for the BI, headed a group of students and postdocs who began working on a silicon nanorod-studded plastic sheet to harvest sunlight. The hydrogen-making catalyst team was headed by Gray, Jay Winkler (a Caltech faculty associate in chemistry), and Jonas Peters (a former Caltech chemistry professor now at MIT). Research with the goal of finding efficient catalysts for the oxidation of water to oxygen was led by MIT scientists Dan Nocera, a former graduate student of Gray's, and Christo
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