20-Mar-2018
-
Mario Pagliaro has given today an
invited lecure at
Institute Charles Gerhardt
Montpellier (
watch the photo and videoalbum).
Held in nice hall of Montpellier's at Polytech, the lecture focused on
sol-gel materials as key enablers of the forthcoming solar chemistry.
Dr Pagliaro showed how long sought-after
solar chemistry
-- namely the use of solar light to drive synthetic processes in the
chemical industry as it happens with Nature's photosynthesis -- is
eventually becoming an industrial
reality,
with several new visible-light photocatalytic processes eventually
being adopted by industry, almost a century after the promising
industrial debut, in 1943 in Germany, of the production of the
anthelmintic drug ascaridole via solar irradiation of α-terpinene.
Dr Pagliaro further argumented how
transparent photoactive sol-gel glasses will play an eminent role in this transition.
He briefly told the story of sol-gel photochemistry from of Avnir's team 1991
study on the photochemical reactivity of molecules trapped in sol-gel glasses, through the new
SiliaSun photocatalysts for synthetic organic chemistry and the
AquaSun antifouling and foul-release paints.
Italy's scholar finished the lecture with three take-home messages:
- Photochemistry within sol-gel glasses has remained underdeveloped for
the last 25 years
- Photocatalysis with sol-gel catalytic glasses works and will be used to make fine chemicals and APIs
- Transparent sol-gel glasses are uniquely suited to mediate visible-light driven reactions under flow using efficient LED light sources
The lecture gathered students, researchers and professors of both the
Institute and Montpellier University at whose
large campus the
ICGM is located. A lively Q&A
session ended the lecture.
The lecturer had been invited by Dr. Hubert Mutin, a well known sol-gel material scientist based at the ICGM.
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