Facile one-pot synthesis of plasmonic gold nanoparticles decorated porphyrin-metal organic framework for photocatalytic hydrogen evolution

Abstract

Plasmonic metals and single-atom nanocomposites have recently gained attention for their enhancement of photocatalyst ability to harvest energy from visible light photons and consequently increase their photoactivity. Over the last decade, the functionalization of Au nanoparticles has been extensively studied to support photocatalytic processes such as hydrogen generation. Furthermore, porphyrin metal-organic frameworks (MOF) materials have demonstrated promising properties such as high crystallinity, surface area, and electron transfer to favor this reaction. Thus, herein Au@PCN(M) nanocomposite was designed by anchoring surface-modified Au nanoparticles into a porphyrin MOF (PCN(M)) where M represents single-atom transition metals (Pt and Co), these nanocomposites were synthesized by both one-pot and post-synthesis methods. Post-synthesis method displayed a higher yield in comparison to the one-pot method, which could be related to the higher crystallinity and metalation of Co and Pt species on PCN-222. Nevertheless, the obtained results for the one-pot method demonstrated that the developed approach is comparable in terms of performance and is promising for the synthesis of efficient plasmonic photocatalysts and their possibility of scale-up in the future.