Can Frustrated Lewis Pairs Really Split Water? A New Paper in Inorg. Chem.
joaquinbarroso
Obtaining hydrogen from water is one of those topics that attracts lots of attention from many fronts in chemistry; on paper, it can be clean, elegant, and deceptively simple. In practice, however, water is stubborn and breaking it apart requires catalysts, large energy inputs, or clever chemistry that juggles thermodynamics and kinetics.
Among the many clever ideas proposed over the last decade, frustrated Lewis pairs (FLPs) stand out. They famously activate H₂ without metals, they’ve been...