3. Different technologies for laboratory-scale photoreactive systems

Artificial photosynthesis can be implemented using two different technologies, both of which are discussed in this section. As stated in the title, only laboratory-scale devices are presented here, since they represent the vast majority of current studies. Indeed, artificial photosynthesis is still essentially a matter for academic research, and there are no pilot plants in France (they are very rare internationally; there are, for example, pilots for CO ₂ reduction at ETH Zürich, at Toshiba's R&D center in Japan and for H ₂ production in Tokyo also in Japan). These small-scale devices are designed for the study and understanding of elementary processes, as well as their modeling, and not to achieve high performance or enable industrial extrapolation. These latter points will be addressed later...