Unique hole-accepting carbon-dots promoting selective carbon dioxide reduction nearly 100% to methanol by pure water
Abstract
Solar-driven CO2 reduction by abundant water to alcohols can supply sustainable liquid fuels and alleviate global warming. However, the sluggish water oxidation reaction has been hardly reported to be efficient and selective in CO2 conversion due to fast charge recombination. Here, using transient absorption spectroscopy, we demonstrate that microwave-synthesised carbon-dots (mCD) possess unique hole-accepting nature, prolonging the electron lifetime (t50%) of carbon nitride (CN) by six folds, favouring a six-electron product. mCD-decorated CN stably produces stoichiometric oxygen and methanol from water and CO2 with nearly 100% selectivity to methanol and internal quantum efficiency of 2.1% in the visible region, further confirmed by isotopic labelling. Such mCD rapidly extracts holes from CN and prevents the surface adsorption of methanol, favourably oxidising water over methanol and enhancing the selective CO2 reduction to alcohols. This work provides a unique strategy for efficient and highly selective CO2 reduction by water to high-value chemicals.
Citation
Wang , Y , Liu , X , Han , X , Godin , R , Chen , J , Zhou , W , Jiang , C , Thompson , J , Bayazit , M , Shevlin , S , Durrant , J , Guo , Z & Tang , J 2020 , ' Unique hole-accepting carbon-dots promoting selective carbon dioxide reduction nearly 100% to methanol by pure water ' , Nature Communications , vol. 11 , 2531 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16227-3
Publication
Nature Communications
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2041-1723Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
X.L., M.K.B., J.T. acknowledge EPSRC (EP/S018204/2/1), Leverhulme Trust (Grant No: RPG-2017-122) and Newton Advanced Fellowship grant ((NA170422 and NAF\R1\191163).). X.H., Z.X.G. and S.A.S. acknowledge UCL Grace High-Performance Computing Facility (Grace@UCL) and EPSRC (EP/K021192/1, EP/L018330/1). R.G. thanks the FRQNT for postdoctoral funding and NSERC for operational funding. Y.W., J.C. and C.J., acknowledge CSC Scholarship. R.G., J.F.T. and J.R.D. acknowledge ERC AdG Intersolar grant (291482). J.F.T. acknowledges EPSRC CDT (EP/L015277/1). W.Z. thanks EPSRC for Titan Themis S/TEM microscope (EP/L017008/01). We also thank Dr. Jijia Xie for constructive comments on experimental design.Collections
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