Boosting solar-driven thermal-assisted photocatalytic hydrogen production through device thermal management

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.