Boosting photocatalytic hydrogen production from water by photothermally induced biphase systems.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 33637719.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-21526-4 and PMC identifier 7910610.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Solar-driven hydrogen production from water using particulate photocatalysts is considered the most economical and effective approach to produce hydrogen fuel with little environmental concern. However, the efficiency of hydrogen production from water in particulate photocatalysis systems is still low. Here, we propose an efficient biphase photocatalytic system composed of integrated photothermal-photocatalytic materials that use charred wood substrates to convert liquid water to water steam, simultaneously splitting hydrogen under light illumination without additional energy. The photothermal-photocatalytic system exhibits biphase interfaces of photothermally-generated steam/photocatalyst/hydrogen, which significantly reduce the interface barrier and drastically lower the transport resistance of the hydrogen gas by nearly two orders of magnitude. In this work, an impressive hydrogen production rate up to 220.74 μmol h<sup>-1</sup> cm<sup>-2</sup> in the particulate photocatalytic systems has been achieved based on the wood/CoO system, demonstrating that the photothermal-photocatalytic biphase system is cost-effective and greatly advantageous for practical applications.