Femtocatalytic photoconversion of methane – PulseCoMeth

The conversion of Methane into more valuable chemicals and fuels has been identified as a win-win strategy towards a decarbonated industry and for the reduction of the green-house-gas. Methane is an abundant compound, that is considered as a climate bomb but, fortunately, that also constitutes a huge reserve of carbon and hydrogen atoms. The direct thermal conversion routes of methane are suffering from high energetical cost and low selectivity. Thus developing low temperature strategies is of great importance. The photo-assisted conversion of methane offers a promising approach to directly transform methane to valuable energy sources under mild conditions, but these researches are still at an early stage, and the catalytic performances achieved experimentally are still far below the requirements for industrial production.
PulseCoMeth aims to go beyond the state of the art by investigating an innovative strategy for the photoconversion of methane based on a synergetic thermo-catalytic activation using ultrashort laser pulses. Toward this aim, an interdisciplinary consortium of chemists and physicists is built by gathering the expertise of LASIRE (femtochemistry), UCCS (methane photocatalysis), LCS (porous material chemistry) and IPR (material multiscale photodynamics). The main goals of PulseCoMeth are (i) the elaboration of multifunctional nanomaterials with dual photocatalytic and photothermal activities (ii) the investigation of photoactivation and photothermal processes by ultrafast pump-probe spectroscopy, and (iii) the establishment of the catalytic performances (selectivity and efficiency) of this femto-catalytic solutions for the photoconversion of methane.