Boosting solar-driven thermal-assisted photocatalytic hydrogen production through device thermal management
Tuo Zhang, Xiangjiu Guan, Bin Zhu, Ziying Zhang, Xiaoyuan Ye, Wengao Zeng, Ze Gao, Liejin Guo
Abstract
To achieve full-spectrum utilization of solar energy, photo-thermal synergistic catalysis for hydrogen production provided an efficient route. However, most of the studies only focused on how to realize the conversion of solar energy to thermal energy , and neglected the dissipation of thermal energy to environment. Here, we designed a device with vacuum insulation layer (DVIL), which can achieve heat transfer optimization to accelerate photocatalytic hydrogen evolution . Compared to conventional device which is in contact with ambient air directly (DCAD), DVIL exhibited faster heating response, and the final equilibrium temperature was raised by ∼20 °C, leading to enhancement of 47.3% and 28.7% on the hydrogen production rate from organic and inorganic reaction system, respectively. Further analysis on the heat transfer process proved that the vacuum layer serves as a thermal resistance that blocks the direct convective heat transfer between the reaction system and ambient air. Such thermal management through simple device designing holds great potential toward practical solar-to-hydrogen conversion and can be extended to other fields of photothermal catalysis.