Colloidal Single-Layer Photocatalysts for Methanol-Storable Solar H<sub>2</sub> Fuel.

Pang, Yingping; Uddin, Md Nasir; Chen, Wei; Javaid, Shaghraf; Barker, Emily; Li, Yunguo; Suvorova, Alexandra; Saunders, Martin et al. · Adv Mater · 2019

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

Molecular surfactants are widely used to control low-dimensional morphologies, including 2D nanomaterials in colloidal chemical synthesis, but it is still highly challenging to accurately control single-layer growth for 2D materials. A scalable stacking-hinderable strategy to not only enable exclusive single-layer growth mode for transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) selectively sandwiched by surfactant molecules but also retain sandwiched single-layer TMDs' photoredox activities is developed. The single-layer growth mechanism is well explained by theoretical calculation. Three types of single-layer TMDs, including MoS<sub>2</sub> , WS<sub>2</sub> , and ReS<sub>2</sub> , are successfully synthesized and demonstrated in solar H<sub>2</sub> fuel production from hydrogen-stored liquid carrier-methanol. Such H<sub>2</sub> fuel production from single-layer MoS<sub>2</sub> nanosheets is CO<sub>x</sub> -free and reliably workable under room temperature and normal pressure with the generation rate reaching ≈617 µmole g<sup>-1</sup> h<sup>-1</sup> and excellent photoredox endurability. This strategy opens up the feasible avenue to develop methanol-storable solar H<sub>2</sub> fuel with facile chemical rebonding actualized by 2D single-layer photocatalysts.