From UV to Near-Infrared Light-Responsive Metal-Organic Framework Composites: Plasmon and Upconversion Enhanced Photocatalysis

Dandan Li; Shu-Hong Yu; Hai-Long Jiang

doi:10.1002/adma.201707377

From UV to Near-Infrared Light-Responsive Metal-Organic Framework Composites: Plasmon and Upconversion Enhanced Photocatalysis

Adv Mater. 2018 Jul;30(27):e1707377. doi: 10.1002/adma.201707377. Epub 2018 May 15.

Authors

Dandan Li¹, Shu-Hong Yu¹, Hai-Long Jiang¹

Affiliation

¹ Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, CAS Key Laboratory of Soft Matter Chemistry, Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, 230026, P. R. China.

PMID: 29766571
DOI: 10.1002/adma.201707377

Abstract

The exploitation of photocatalysts that harvest solar spectrum as broad as possible remains a high-priority target yet grand challenge. In this work, for the first time, metal-organic framework (MOF) composites are rationally fabricated to achieve broadband spectral response from UV to near-infrared (NIR) region. In the core-shell structured upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs)-Pt@MOF/Au composites, the MOF is responsive to UV and a bit visible light, the plasmonic Au nanoparticles (NPs) accept visible light, whereas the UCNPs absorb NIR light to emit UV and visible light that are harvested by the MOF and Au once again. Moreover, the MOF not only facilitates the generation of "bare and clean" Au NPs on its surface and realizes the spatial separation for the Au and Pt NPs, but also provides necessary access for catalytic substrates/products to Pt active sites. As a result, the optimized composite exhibits excellent photocatalytic hydrogen production activity (280 µmol g^-1 h^-1 ) under simulated solar light, and the involved mechanism of photocatalytic H₂ production under UV, visible, and NIR irradiation is elucidated. Reportedly, this is an extremely rare study on photocatalytic H₂ production by light harvesting in all UV, visible, and NIR regions.

Keywords: full solar light; metal-organic frameworks; near-infrared light; photocatalysis; photocatalytic H2 production.