Photoredox matching of earth-abundant photosensitizers with hydrogen evolving catalysts by first-principles predictions

Abstract

Photoredox properties of several earth-abundant light-harvesting transition metal complexes in combination with cobalt-based proton reduction catalysts have been investigated computationally to assess the fundamental viability of different photocatalytic systems of current experimental interest. Density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent DFT (TD-DFT) calculations using several GGA (BP86, BLYP), hybrid-GGA (B3LYP, B3LYP*), hybrid meta-GGA (M06, TPSSh), and range-separated hybrid (ωB97X, CAM-B3LYP) functionals were used to calculate relevant ground and excited state reduction potentials for photosensitizers, catalysts, and sacrificial electron donors. Linear energy correction factors for the DFT/TD-DFT results that provide the best agreement with available experimental reference results were determined in order to provide more accurate predictions. Among the selection of functionals, the B3LYP* and TPSSh sets of correction parameters were determined to give the best redox potentials and excited states energies, ΔEexc, with errors of ∼0.2 eV. Linear corrections for both reduction and oxidation processes significantly improve the predictions for all the redox pairs. In particular, for TPSSh and B3LYP*, the calculated errors decrease by more than 0.5 V against experimental values for catalyst reduction potentials, photosensitizer oxidation potentials, and electron donor oxidation potentials. Energy-corrected TPSSh results were finally used to predict the energetics of complete photocatalytic cycles for the light-driven activation of selected proton reduction cobalt catalysts. These predictions demonstrate the broader usefulness of the adopted approach to systematically predict full photocycle behavior for first-row transition metal photosensitizer–catalyst combinations more broadly.