IIT Bombay is organising Institute Colloquium on Tuesday, November 10, 2009.

The details are as follows:

Speaker: Professor Marc Fontecave

                  Head of laboratory

                  Professor of the Collège de France

                 Chair of Chemistry of biological processes

                 Member of the Academy of Sciences

                 Honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France

Topic:     Hydrogen: Water, Sun and Catalysts

Date:      Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Time & Venue :  4.30 p.m., F. C. Kohli  Auditorium

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Abstract : One of the grand challenges of twenty-first century chemistry is to convert abundant energy-poor molecules to energy rich molecules using sunlight as the energy source. Hydrogen from water is such a solar fuel. However its production and use currently depend on noble metals such as Platinum which is expensive and not abundant enough. Viable renewable energy systems will require new catalysts made from Earth-abundant materials, cheap and robust. We will describe our bioinspired strategy, aiming at reproducing hydrogenase active sites, which leads to remarkable Cobalt-based and Nickel-based (photo) catalysts for hydrogen production.