Accelerated pyro-catalytic hydrogen production enabled by plasmonic local heating of Au on pyroelectric BaTiO3 nanoparticles
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
Abstract
Abstract The 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 BaTiO 3 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.