Bettina Baumgartner
University of AmsterdamA Multi-Spectroscopic Approach to Study Photo-Active Metal-Organic Frameworks
To advance towards a sustainable chemical industry, energy-efficient methods are crucial for utilizing abundant carbon sources like carbon dioxide and methane. These molecules have high binding energies, posing challenges for existing catalysts. A promising strategy involves using porous materials combined with photoredox chemistry to concentrate and activate CO2 and CH4 within nanometer-sized pores, converting them into basic chemicals using sunlight.
Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are particularly suitable due to their tunable porosity and ability to integrate photoredox-active molecules. Despite successful integration of natural building blocks such as (metallo)porphyrins, their performance still lags behind natural photosynthetic systems, highlighting the need to explore coordination chemistry to enhance reactivity and selectivity.
Our research utilized multiple spectroscopic techniques to investigate these processes. Techniques included operando UV-visible diffuse reflection spectroscopy (UV-vis DRS), Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy in attenuated total reflection (ATR) configuration, transient absorption spectroscopy (TAS), electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), and X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS). These methods allowed us to quantify reactant sorption sites, identify photoconversion products, track optoelectronic changes, and uncover crucial energy transfer dynamics.
The results demonstrated the importance of the local electronic and structural environments in MOFs, providing insights that are vital for designing next-generation materials optimized for sustainable chemical conversions.
Bettina Baumgartner is a tenure-track assistant professor at the Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences, University of Amsterdam, since 2024. Bettina earned her PhD from TU Wien (Austria, 2019), focusing on infrared-spectroscopy sensing through porous films. She was a JSPS postdoctoral researcher at Osaka Prefecture University (2020), developing IR spectroscopy techniques to study host-guest interactions in MOFs. In 2021, she received a FWF Schrödinger fellowship to research CO2 photoreduction in MOFs at Utrecht University. Her work combines porous photoactive materials with spectroscopy to explore how spatial confinement affects catalytic activity and selectivity, thereby advancing sustainable chemical processes.