Accelerated pyro-catalytic hydrogen production enabled by plasmonic local heating of Au on pyroelectric BaTiO3 nanoparticles

• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-33818-4
• Publication Date: 2022-10-17T16:03:30Z
• Authors: Huilin You; Siqi Li; Yulong Fan; Xuyun Guo; Zezhou Lin; Ran Ding; Xin Cheng; Hao Zhang; Tsz Woon Benedict Lo; Jianhua Hao; Ye Zhu; Hwa-Yaw Tam; Dangyuan Lei; Chi-Hang Lam; Haitao Huang
• Keywords: Science; Q; 01 natural sciences; 7. Clean energy; Article; 0104 chemical sciences

AbstractThe greatest challenge that limits the application of pyro-catalytic materials is the lack of highly frequent thermal cycling due to the enormous heat capacity of ambient environment, resulting in low pyro-catalytic efficiency. Here, we introduce localized plasmonic heat sources to rapidly yet efficiently heat up pyro-catalytic material itself without wasting energy to raise the surrounding temperature, triggering a significantly expedited pyro-catalytic reaction and enabling multiple pyro-catalytic cycling per unit time. In our work, plasmonic metal/pyro-catalyst composite is fabricated by in situ grown gold nanoparticles on three-dimensional structured coral-like BaTiO3 nanoparticles, which achieves a high hydrogen production rate of 133.1 ± 4.4 μmol·g−1·h−1 under pulsed laser irradiation. We also use theoretical analysis to study the effect of plasmonic local heating on pyro-catalysis. The synergy between plasmonic local heating and pyro-catalysis will bring new opportunities in pyro-catalysis for pollutant treatment, clean energy production, and biological applications.