Chemical Society Reviews· 2014Q1· Review
Earth-abundant cocatalysts for semiconductor-based photocatalytic water splitting
- 2,505citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2014year
Short summary
This review highlights earth-abundant cocatalysts as a crucial, yet underdeveloped, component for efficient and cost-effective photocatalytic water splitting, a key technology for clean hydrogen production.
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Key points
- Earth-abundant cocatalysts are essential for cost-effective photocatalytic water splitting.
- Current systems often require rare and expensive noble metal cocatalysts, limiting scalability.
- This review consolidates research on earth-abundant cocatalysts for H2 and O2 evolution.
- The functional mechanisms of these cocatalysts in enhancing photocatalytic efficiency are discussed.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Photocatalytic water splitting represents a promising strategy for clean, low-cost, and environmental-friendly production of H2 by utilizing solar energy. There are three crucial steps for the photocatalytic water splitting reaction: solar light harvesting, charge separation and transportation, and the catalytic H2 and O2 evolution reactions. While significant achievement has been made in optimizing the first two steps in the photocatalytic process, much less efforts have been put into improving the efficiency of the third step, which demands the utilization of cocatalysts. To date, cocatalysts based on rare and expensive noble metals are still required for achieving reasonable activity in most semiconductor-based photocatalytic systems, which seriously restricts their large-scale application. Therefore, seeking cheap, earth-abundant and high-performance cocatalysts is indispensable to achieve cost-effective and highly efficient photocatalytic water splitting. This review for the first time summarizes all the developed earth-abundant cocatalysts for photocatalytic H2- and O2-production half reactions as well as overall water splitting. The roles and functional mechanism of the cocatalysts are discussed in detail. Finally, this review is concluded with a summary, and remarks on some challenges and perspectives in this emerging area of research.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Chemical Society Reviews, 2014 · DOI ↗
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Field: Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the EnvironmentEnergy