Pixel International Conferences

Chemical reactions with light are the basis of life on earth and currently highly relevant with regard to the climate debate. However, their importance is not yet adequately reflected in school education, and consideration in chemistry classes is often limited to narrow focal points, such as photovoltaics or light as a possible radical starter [1]. To fill this gap to some extent, we propose the sustainable generation of hydrogen with sunlight as a valuable extension of the curricula. This area offers the potential to address students' interest in green chemistry and synergistically link several classical school chemistry contents with societal issues.

Reactions driven by (solar) light are the main focus of the German transregional collaborative research center CataLight [2]. To pave way for a broad usage of abundant solar energy, CataLight develops molecular light-driven chromophores and catalysts, and establishes concepts for their integration into soft matter matrices. In close cooperation between chemistry and chemistry didactics, central results are didactically reconstructed for school chemistry education [3]. An important building block for understanding the scientific background is the tracking of photochemical processes. However, schools often lack the necessary equipment for quantitative analysis. For this reason, we developed a low-cost photometer module for the existing LabPi measurement framework [4]. This offers teachers accurate, inexpensive, and easy-to-use analytics and enables quantitative observation of diverse processes and reactions with light.

In this paper, we demonstrate the analytical capabilities of the LabPi photometer using the photochemical hydrogenation of a ruthenium complex [5] as an example, which is considered to have great potential for photocatalytic water splitting in research. Within this simple experiment, we will combine the UV light irradiation with a simultaneous measurement of the reaction progress over time. These results are easy to analyse and can be obtained by pupils within a few minutes.