On November 15, the research group led by Prof. Tan Bien published an online paper entitled “Immobilized Covalent Triazine Frameworks Films as Effective Photocatalysts for Hydrogen Evolution Reaction” on Nature Communications.
Covalent triazine frameworks have recently been demonstrated as promising materials for photocatalytic water splitting and are usually used in the form of suspended powder. From a practical point of view, immobilized CTFs materials are more suitable for large-scale water splitting, owing to their convenient separation and recycling potential. However, existing synthetic approaches mainly result in insoluble and unprocessable powders, which make their future device application a formidable challenge. Herein, we report an aliphatic amine-assisted interfacial polymerization method to obtain free-standing, semicrystalline CTFs film with excellent photoelectric performance. The lateral size of the film was up to 250 cm2, and average thickness can be tuned from 30 to 500 nm. The semicrystalline structure was confirmed by high-resolution transmission electron microscope, powder X-ray diffraction, grazing-incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering, and small-angle X-ray scattering analysis. Intrigued by the good light absorption, crystalline structure, and large lateral size of the film, the film immobilized on a glass support exhibited good photocatalytic hydrogen evolution performance (5.4 mmol h-1 m-2) with the presence of co-catalysts i.e., Pt nanoparticles and was easy to recycle.
Huazhong University of Science and Technology is the only author unit of this paper. Prof. Tan Bien is the co-corresponding authors of the paper. The first author is PhD students Hu Xunliang from the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Co-authors are Master student Zhan Zhen from the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Dr. Zhang Jianqiao from Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility, and Prof. Irshad Hussain from Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan. This research work was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program (2018YFE0117300), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22161142005, 21975086) and the Hubei Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (2019CFA008).
Link to this paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26817-4
