Assembling a bifunctional BiOCl/Bi-MOF catalyst via sharing Bi-Cl bond: Achieving ultra-efficient CO2 capture and photoreduction

Abstract

Recently, capturing and photocatalytically converting CO2 to carbon fuels has been demonstrated as a sustainable and green approach to solve the issue of greenhouse gas with good efficiency and low cost. However, the most photocatalysts suffer from low solar light harvest and poor CO2 adsorption capacity. Here, the BiOCl nanoflowers have been in situ planted on Bi-MOF nanosheets to form BiOCl/Bi-MOF hybrids, in which BiOCl flowers contribute to harvest solar light and Bi-MOF nanosheets response to capture CO2. Moreover, by the shared Bi-Cl bonding linkage, the smoothly tunnels is constructed to quickly transport photo-generated carriers. Hence, the assembly presents excellent CO2 capture and light-driven CO2-conversion activity, reaching up to 456.7 μmol⋅g−1⋅h−1. Furthermore, different from the quickly decreased activity of the pristine BiOCl during the reaction proceeding, the CO2 photoreduction performance of BiOCl/Bi-MOF hybrid does not change much under wet air with consecutive eight hours recycle. The present investigation may provide a new strategy to prepare highly effective photocatalysts by in situ constructing bifunctional heterojunctions in the application of CO2 capture and visible-light-driven conversion.