Lessons learnt in photocatalysis – the influence of solvent polarity and the photostability of the photocatalyst

Abstract

Herein, we show that there is significant variation in both the triplet energies and redox properties of photocatalysts as a function of solvent based on a study of eight PCs in four solvents of varying polarity. A range of photocatalytic electron and energy transfer reactions were investigated using a subset of the PCs. For the photoredox reactions, the yields are not correlated with solvent polarity. Instead, when the PC could promote the formation of the target product, we observed photodegradation for all PCs across all solvents, something that is rarely investigated in the literature. This, therefore, makes it difficult to ascertain whether the parent PC and/or the photodegraded product is responsible for the photochemistry, or indeed, whether photodegradation is actually detrimental to the reaction yield. Conversely, the PCs were found to be photostable for energy transfer reactions; however, yields were not correlated to the triplet energies of the PCs, highlighting that triplet energies alone are not a suitable descriptor to discriminate the performance between PCs in photoinduced energy transfer processes.