Abstract
The photocatalytic performance of fluorene-type polymer photocatalysts for hydrogen production from water in the presence of a sacrificial hole scavenger is significantly improved by the incorporation of heteroatoms into the bridge-head through a combination of factors.
Highlights
The photocatalytic generation of hydrogen from water by water splitting using sunlight is an important area of research
We tried to correlate the observed hydrogen evolution rates with a range of different measured and predicted polymer properties: we focused in this comparison on co-polymers in the p-XPh and p-XS families because they allow for the most likefor-like comparison
In previous work,[30,32] we found that the key properties to consider are the optical gap, the wavelength below which the polymer starts absorbing light (Fig. 1b),[17] the thermodynamic potentials of charge-carriers in the polymer (Fig. 2),[12] and the dispersibility of the polymer in the reaction medium.[11]
Summary
The photocatalytic generation of hydrogen from water by water splitting using sunlight is an important area of research. Triethylamine (TEA) was used as the hole-scavenger,[9,14] while methanol was added to aid mixing of the TEA with water.[9,17] The measured hydrogen evolution rates (HERs) under visible light (l > 420 nm, 300 W Xe light source) ranged from 3.2 mmol hÀ1 to 147.1 mmol hÀ1, with photocatalyst p-FuS being found to be the most active of the polymers in this study (Table 1).
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