Artificial photosynthesis

While light-driven water splitting offers a renewable means to produce fuel, the limited availability of high-performance materials inspires the search for new photocatalysts. Here, authors demonstrate two-dimensional NiPS₃ to enhance semiconductor photocatalytic H₂ evolution activities.

Photoelectrochemical devices for hydrogen production via water splitting often suffer from short lifetimes due to semiconductor photocorrosion and catalyst instability. Here the authors demonstrate a polyacrylamide hydrogel as a permeable and transparent protection layer to improve the stability of photoelectrodes.

The pulp and paper industry produces approximately 50 million metric tons of lignin per year as a waste product. Here, lignin is shown to act as a photocatalyst for the solar-driven synthesis of hydrogen peroxide from H₂O and O₂ under visible light. Coupling this photocatalytic process with unspecific peroxygenases enables the enantioselective oxyfunctionalization of C–H bonds.

An inorganic and robust photocatalytic system based on Mo-doped faceted BiVO4 particles exhibits a solar-to-chemical conversion efficiency of 0.29% for H₂O₂ generation, a new record among inorganic systems.

Artificial photosynthesis offers an integrated means to convert light to fuel, but efficiencies are often low. Here, authors report a Z-scheme system utilizing Ir and FeCoO_x co-catalysts to enhance charge separation on BiVO₄ facets that achieves high quantum efficiencies for overall water splitting.

Fuels synthesized using sunlight offer a sustainable solution for chemical energy storage, but inefficient utilization of the solar spectrum has limited their broader viability. This Review looks at how approaches that are complementary to one another can be employed to better exploit solar energy for sunlight-to-fuel conversion.