Proceedings of MATSUS Fall 2023 Conference (MATSUSFall23)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.matsus.2023.100
Publication date: 18th July 2023
The development of cheap and environmentally friendly fuels and chemicals whose production will be based on abundant and renewable resources appears as one of the main challenges in our society. Among different approaches, the direct use of sunlight for the valorisation of abundant resources, such as H2O, N2 or CO2, has been proposed as an appealing approach for the environmentally friendly and sustainable production of high added-value fuels and chemicals, such as H2, NH3, CH3OH or CH2CH2, among others, the so-called “solar fuels”. In this context, the photochemical solar fuels production is currently limited by the low light-to-chemical efficiency and the fact that in semiconductor-based photocatalysts light harvesting is usually restricted to the UV and visible blue light, and typically is affected by low charge separation efficiency and high recombination rates. In an alternative mechanism, photons from the visible and near infra-red (NIR) regions may interact with metal nanoparticles supported on thermally insulating materials by localized metal surface plasmon resonance (LSPR). In this pathway, much higher production rates and conversions have been reported since photon absorption promotes a localized heating in the active sites due to photon energy thermalization and generation of “hot carriers”, which influence the electronic structure of the species involved in the reaction.
In this presentation, it will be shown the design and fabrication of advanced multifunctional materials for the photothermal CO2 hydrogenation and NH3 production reactions in continuous flow. Moreover, mechanistic studies aimed to unravel which are the actual acfive sites and operational mode will be commented in detail. These research has the potential to advance the field and pave the way for the sustainalbe production of fuels and chemicals.