Greenhouse gas emission neutrality by 2050 is the core of developing a sustainable society. Hydrogen becomes a molecule of increasing interest and is considered as one primary solution to achieve this target in Germany and Europe. Three critical questions have to be addressed: how to produce sufficient and clean H2? Which resources should be used? And which technology should be developed for H2 production? The sustainable production of H2 plays a critical role in reaching the ambitious goal committed by the European Union (including Germany). Ultimately, breaking the relatively infinite resource water into H2 using infinite sunlight can be the ideal solution.

How to exploit the sunlight for splitting water to pure H2 via a resource-/energy-friendly approach? Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), our group will exploit a unique carbon-sink biohybrid technique termed Biophotovoltaics (BPV) to achieve this goal.

In this project, the overall research goal is to define a process window and thus develop a process concept for a BPV to drive its future application by exploiting interfacial interactions between different aspects on multiple scales. The system boundaries are determined by the microbial physiology and process kinetics which happen dynamically and iteratively on the scales of operating time and system dimension. This project will systematically and quantitatively reveal the impacts of microbial and process kinetics on the system performance and also the influence of time, process scale and dynamic environmental conditions. All the knowledge will be merged together into a digital twin platform to gain a holistic understanding of the BPV system, which ultimately will lead to rational design and development of the BPV process to reach productivity and scale of practical interest. Briefly, our group will address and answer the following four questions via respective working packages:
i) What process concept is feasible for the long-term field application of BPV?
ii) How can we steer the cyanobacterial physiology to favour the anodic electron sink?
iii) How can we improve the cellular electron flux towards anode for efficient H2 formation?
iv) What is the capacity of BPV for H2 production and the constraints to realize it?