The Catalyst Review asked asked Professor Parrino to discuss relevant engineering aspects associated with selective heterogeneous photocatalytic processes.

摘要

Heterogeneous photocatalysis exploits the property of irradiated semiconductors to generate positive and negative charges and to induce useful redox reactions.Although environmental remediation is an obvious field of application,photocatalysis alone is hardly sustainable for such large-scale processes.However,photocatalysis is currently gaining increasing importance as an appealing alternative to traditional organic syntheses.Currently,only a few industrial processes are photocatalytic,and most of them occur in the homogeneous phase.In this regard,the existence of traditional operating plants is possibly the main economic hurdle to a successful industrial conversion to photocatalytic syntheses,which,in many cases,can afford remarkable efficiencies and yields.However,we believe that other”technical”issues such as reactor design require more in-depth attention in order to enable industrial exploitation of synthetic photocatalysis.It is important to apply such considerations to each photocatalytic process of interest due to the highly specific nature of light-matter interactions.