The American Chemical Society assembled its grand hive mind of chemists for the 239th time in San Francisco last week. Among the 12,000 presentations delivered across a wide spectrum of scientific disciplines, a presentation by doctors Tongxiang Fan, Di Zhang, and Han Zhou of the State Key Lab of Matrix Composites at Shanghai Jiaotong University highlighted a rapidly growing trend in chemical engineering. The group presented efforts towards designing renewable energy systems with a synthetic leaf, where the prototype would capture photons and use them to change water into hydrogen fuel.
(more…)