Pollen Carbon-Based Rare-Earth Composite Material for Highly Efficient Photocatalytic Hydrogen Production from Ethanol-Water Mixtures

Xia Jiang; Yan-Xin Chen; Jing-Wen Zhou; Shi-Wei Lin; Can-Zhong Lu

doi:10.1021/acsomega.2c03949

Pollen Carbon-Based Rare-Earth Composite Material for Highly Efficient Photocatalytic Hydrogen Production from Ethanol-Water Mixtures

ACS Omega. 2022 Aug 19;7(34):30495-30503. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.2c03949. eCollection 2022 Aug 30.

Authors

Xia Jiang^{1

2}, Yan-Xin Chen^{1

2}, Jing-Wen Zhou^{1

2

3}, Shi-Wei Lin^{1

2

4}, Can-Zhong Lu^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ CAS Key Laboratory of Design and Assembly of Functional Nanostructures, and Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Nanomaterials, Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fuzhou 350002, P. R. China.
² Xiamen Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Photoelectric Functional Materials, Xiamen Institute of Rare-earth Materials, Haixi Institutes, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021, P. R. China.
³ College of Chemistry and Materials Science, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, Fujian 350007, P. R. China.
⁴ School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Jiangxi University of Science and Technology, Ganzhou 341000, P. R. China.

Abstract

The unique electronic structure of rare-earth elements makes their modified semiconductor photocatalysts show great advantages in solar energy conversion. Herein, the pollen-like N, P self-doped biochar-based rare-earth composite catalyst (Er/LP-C) has been successfully synthesized, which combines the advantages of biochar and Er and is used for the first time in the field of photocatalytic hydrogen production from ethanol-water mixtures. Experimental results confirmed that the performance of photocatalytic hydrogen production under the full spectrum is up to 33.70 μmol/g in 6 h; this is due to the introduction of Er, which improves the carrier concentration, separation and transfer efficiency, and the driving force for the reduction reaction.