Producing low-cost metal-oxide thin films with high electronic quality for solar water splitting is not an easy task. Especially since quality improvements of the upper metal oxide thin films need .
Downsizing and atomically dispersing metal species particles on a carrier substrate has emerged as a new frontier of heterogenous catalysis, which can achieve maximize the utilization efficiency of metal element, in structures such as single atom catalysts (SACs), dimer, cluster and nanoparticle catalysts. Moreover,benefitting from the optimized geometric and electronic structure, the adsorption and desorption ability for different reaction intermediates can be optimized. Over the past decades, numerous atomic-level electrocatalysts have been designed and successfully applied in the field of electrocatalysis, including nitrogen reduction reaction (NRR), hydrogen evolution rection (HER), oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), oxygen evolution reaction (OER) etc. In addition, with the advancement of characterization technologies and quantum computational chemistry, such as scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and density functional theory (DFT),
A metal foam could underpin a low-cost method for generating carbon-free fuels, researchers from KAUST have shown. The team seamlessly coated the foam with iron and cobalt nanomaterials to create .
A new method can measure the electrical (re-)charging of boundary layers between very small, metallic particles and aqueous solutions and understand it at a molecular level.
Researchers from the .
Photocatalytic water splitting is a promising strategy to produce hydrogen as a sustainable and clean energy carrier, based on abundant solar energy and semiconductor photocatalysts, and it has received extensive research and discussion over the past several decades. It is challenging, however, to achieve an efficient solar-to-hydrogen evolution process with a single particulate photocatalyst due to the weak solar spectrum harvest and the rapid recombination of photogenerated electron-hole pairs during the photocatalysis reaction. Combining semiconductors to create different co-catalysts presents a viable solution to the above issues. Recently, semiconductor photocatalysts modified by different transition metal sulfide-based co-catalysts with designed functions, especially in light absorption enhancement and charge-carrier-separation efficiency promotion, have attracted much attention. As continued breakthroughs have been made in the preparation, modification, and solar-to-hydrogen evo