Recently, Professor Deng Weiqiao's team from the Institute of Frontier and Interdisciplinary Science of Shandong University made new progress in the field of covalent organic framework for photocatalytic hydrogen production, and the research paper entitled "In Situ Photodeposition of Platinum Clusters on A Covalent Organic Framework for Photocatalytic Hydrogen Production" was published in Nature Communications. Shandong University is the first author institute of this paper.
Photocatalytic hydrogen production has been considered a promising approach to obtaining green hydrogen energy. Recently, crystalline porous materials with nanoscale pore structure and ultra-high surface have arisen as key photocatalysts for efficient hydrogen production. In the research of covalent organic framework photocatalyst, the expensive noble-metal platinum was found to be an excellent co-catalyst to catalyse surface proton reduction to hydrogen. However, the rational deposition of Pt on the framework of a COF was rarely considered in the research, resulting in the random growth of Pt nanoparticles with a large size and limited exposed active surface even at a high loading amount, which affects the efficiency and economy of photocatalyst.
Therefore, Deng Weiqiao's team designed a type of covalent organic framework photocatalyst (PY-DHBD-COF), which bears an adjacent hydroxyl group and imine bond in each constitutional unit. It is found that this region can adsorb platinum precursors, and photogenerated electrons are more inclined to migrate to this region in the photocatalytic process, which lead to in situ photodeposition of Pt clusters on the 2D COF surface layer with ultra-high dispersion. This well-dispersed deposition contributes to the optimal utilization of Pt cocatalyst and an extraordinary hydrogen evolution rate of 42432 μmol g-1 h-1 at 1 wt% Pt loading. This work provides a direction for manipulating the deposition of photocatalytic co-catalysts at the atomic level by taking full advantage of the designable and tunable pore structure of a COF to develop an efficient photocatalyst.
Master’s degree holder Li Yimeng and postdoctoral candidate Yang Li from the Institute of Frontier and Interdisciplinary Science of Shandong University are the co-first authors of this paper. Assistant researcher Li Zhen and Professor Deng Weiqiao are co-corresponding authors. The above research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China, National Natural Science Foundation of China and Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province and the Program of Young Scholars Future Program of Shandong University.
Link to this paper:https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29076-z
