New Progress in Photocatalytic CO2 Reduction (PCR)

Recently, Professor Lizhi Zhang’s group of College of Chemistry CCNU made new progress in exciton effect regulation and surface defect construction of van der Waals materials for high efficient photocatalytic CO2 reduction (PCR). Their article titled “Van Der Waals Gap-Rich BiOCl Atomic Layers Realizing Efficient, Pure-Water CO2-to-CO Photocatalysis” was published in internationally renowned journal Nature Communications. Drs. Yanbiao Shi, Jie Li and Chengliang Mao are the co-first authors of this article. 

PCR technology attracts great attention because of its potential to solve the energy crisis and greenhouse effect. Professor Zhang’s group successfully realized an efficient PCR process of CO production rate of 188.2 μmol g−1 h−1, with using only visible light irradiation, pure water, CO2, and atomically thin Van Der Waals Gap (VDWG) rich BiOCl nanosheets. These nanosheets were synthesized via a generalizable gas-phase exfoliation process similar to the syngas synthetic route. Compared with bulk BiOCl, the VDWG-rich atomic layers possess a weaker excitonic confinement power to remarkably decrease exciton binding energy and enhance the bulk charge separation efficiency, as well as facilitate the formation of VDWG-Bi-VO••-Bi defect to accelerate the CO2-to-CO transformation via the synchronous optimization of CO2 activation, *COOH splitting, and *CO desorption.  

This work was financially supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant 2018YFC1800701), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 21936003, 21872061 and 21906126), and the 111 Project (Grant B17019).

URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26219-6

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