Dettagli Progetti e Finanziamenti

Abstract: The goal of SOCRATES is to develop an integrated process for the production of renewable ammonia, exploiting the photoassisted thermocatalytic hydrogenation of nitrogen with green hydrogen obtained from visible light-mediated photocatalytic water reduction.
The overall process will employ an advanced optical system especially developed by the project consortium, by means of which the incident solar radiation will be spectrally split and directed towards the different reactors. The visible fraction of the split light will be used to drive the photocatalytic generation of molecular H2 from water by means of H+ reduction, mediated by hybrid organic/inorganic heterogeneous photocatalysts. The remaining part of solar radiation, together with additional incident light, will be concentrated and used to generate heat, which will be exploited to drive the thermocatalytic hydrogenation of elemental nitrogen, employing the hydrogen produced in the previous stage.
Thus, the main outcome will be the production of ammonia as a renewable fuel, accomplished by applying milder reaction conditions compared to existing methods and without relying on the use of precious or rare metals-based catalysts.
In the first part of the project, the different individual processes (spectral splitting and light concentration; photocatalytic hydrogen production; thermocatalytic ammonia production) will be studied separately and optimized to allow their integration into a smal lscale demonstrator, whose fabrication and testing under outdoor conditions will be carried out in the final part of the activity.
The SOCRATES consortium is composed by 7 partners from 5 different European countries, bringing together a wide knowledge base going from optics to synthetic chemistry, spectroscopy, catalysis, chemical and process engineering, and life cycle assessment, whose efficient combination will be essential to reach the final objectives of the project.