News

Prof. Chang I Jy from the Department of Chemistry and PhD student Kelvin Yun-Da Tsai has a breakthrough in the research of solar power. The ruthenium bipyridine complex, under the excitation of light will effectively catalyzes the oxidation of bromide to bromine. The research result was published at the famous journal Inorganic Chemistry and was chosen as cover story.

The laboratory of Prof. Chang has been focusing on Photochemistry for years. 

In recent years, the storage of solar energy has gained importance in the research field, Professor Chang also put partial emphasis on it. Due to her research in photoexcitation reaction, they knew hat direct photoexcitation of electron transfer usually produces highly reactive intermediate material, which causes reverse electron transfer reaction or side effects that couldn’t store energy.

To solve this problem, PhD student Kelvin Yun-Da Tsai uses the excitation and quenching mechanism to avoid that issue. Upon visible-light irradiation, the [Ru(deeb)2(dmbpy)]2+ complex catalyzes the oxidation of bromide to bromine with a high turnover number. Direct photoinduced electron transfer usually results in highly reactive species that either cause back electron-transfer or side reactions. In this work, a flash-quench mechanism was employed to circumvent this problem. By adjustment of the concentration of the reactants, photogenerated [Ru(deeb)2(dmbpy)]3+ is utilized as the catalyst and catalyzes the oxidation of bromide to bromine nearly quantitatively. The TON reaches 230 for 5 cycles. This is the reason why the article is selected as cover story.