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  Copyright: Daniel Ditz

Research

Enough sunlight reaches earth’s surface every hour to satisfy the world’s energy demand. Here, photocatalysis offers the opportunity to directly utilize the electromagnetic radiation for chemical valorization.

Covalent triazine-based networks (CTFs) are of high interest in photocatalysis because their polymer structure allows various modifications to optimize important properties like bandgap, charge separation and redox potentials. In order to elucidate structure-activity relationships classical analysis methods for heterogeneous catalysts as well as electrochemical and computational methods are used.

Research focus

• Photoredox catalysis of biomass based platform chemicals
• Analysis of structure-activity relationships of CTF-photocatalysts
• Quantum mechanical simulations of optical and electronic properties of CTFs

Research internships focusing on the synthesis and characterization of CTFs, their application in photocatalysis or the calculation of their optical and electronic properties are readily available.