1833
(Invited) Coupling Solar Energy into Catalytic CO2 Conversion

Sunday, 13 May 2018: 13:35
Room 612 (Washington State Convention Center)
Y. Xiong (University of Science and Technology of China)
Considering the excessive emission of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by the combustion of fossil fuels, the sunlight-driven CO2 reduction into higher energy chemicals, such as carbon monoxide, formic acid, methanol or methane, offers a more promising approach to alleviate both global warming and energy crisis. Designing new photocatalytic materials for improving the photoconversion efficiency is a promising route to achieve this goal. Despite the invention of a large number of catalytic materials with well-defined structures, their overall efficiency in photocatalysis is still quite limited as the three key steps - light harvesting, charge generation and separation, and charge transfer to surface for redox reactions - have not been substantially improved. To improve each step in the complex process, there is a major trend to develop materials based on inorganic hybrid structures, in which surface and interface engineering holds the promise for boosting the overall efficiency. In this talk, I will demonstrate several different approaches to designing inorganic hybrid structures with improved photocatalytic performance via surface and interface engineering. It is anticipated that this series of works open a new window to rationally designing inorganic hybrid materials for photo-induced applications.