China News Service, Hefei, March 2 (Reporter Wu Lan) The reporter learned from the University of Science and Technology of China on the 2nd that Professor Xiong Yujie and Long Ran's research team at the school designed a class of plasmonic catalytic materials that achieved visible light and infrared radiation. Highly selective conversion of carbon dioxide and water in the light zone.

Relevant research results have been published in the internationally renowned academic journal Nature Communications (Nature Communications).

  According to reports, this technology uses broad-spectrum low-intensity light, the methane yield is as high as 0.55 millimoles per gram per hour, and the product selectivity of hydrocarbons reaches 100%, which is currently the highest record for light-driven carbon dioxide resource utilization.

  It has been a long-standing dream of human beings to use artificial materials to carry out chemical reactions similar to photosynthesis in nature and use sunlight, carbon dioxide and water to produce substances needed by humans, but they are facing major challenges such as how to use low-energy photons in sunlight.

  Infrared light is a typical low-energy photon in the solar spectrum, accounting for up to 53% of the solar spectrum.

The usual semiconductor photocatalysis technology can only use photons in the ultraviolet and visible regions to drive chemical conversion, which restricts the efficiency of solar energy utilization.

  In recent years, several advanced plasmonic catalysis research teams in the world have proposed the idea of ​​using the plasmonic effect of metal nanomaterials to drive catalytic reactions, hoping to solve the bottleneck problem faced by semiconductor photocatalysis, but there are chemical Weakness of low conversion activity.

  In the past ten years of research, Xiong Yujie's research team focused on the conversion reaction of carbon dioxide and water, and based on the design of catalytic active sites of plasmonic materials, an effective hybrid coupling system of metal and carbon dioxide molecules was formed.

Through spectral characterization under a series of working conditions, efficient multiphoton absorption and selective energy transfer are realized.

  Based on this mechanism of action, the materials designed by the research team can drive the highly selective conversion of carbon dioxide and water into hydrocarbons in both the visible and infrared light regions.

Subsequently, the team designed and optimized the reaction device to achieve efficient absorption of scattered photons, thus breaking through the current bottleneck in the field of light-driven carbon dioxide resource utilization.

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