Photo- and thermo-coupled electrocatalysis in carbon dioxide and methane conversion

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFA0700101 and 2016YFA0202801), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21431003 and 21521091). Wang G thanks the financial support from CAS Youth Innovation Promotion (2015145).

Interest statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Contributions statement

Wang X proposed and guided the project. Yang D and Wang G wrote the paper. Wang X and Wang G revised the manuscript. All authors joined the discussion and gave useful suggestions.

Author information

Deren Yang is currently a PhD candidate in inorganic chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Xun Wang at Tsinghua University. His research interests include the design, synthesis and application of novel catalysts for photo-coupled electrocatalysis.

Guoxiong Wang obtained his PhD in physical chemistry from Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2006. He worked at Hokkaido University as postdoctoral researcher from 2007 to 2010. Then he joined Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics in 2010 and became a full professor in 2015. His research interests include highly efficient catalytic materials and processes for electrochemical energy conversion and storage, such as electrocatalytic reduction of CO₂, fuel cells and zinc-air battery, etc.

Xun Wang obtained his PhD in chemistry from Tsinghua University in 2004. Then he joined the Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University in 2004, and became a full professor in 2007. His research interests include the design, synthesis and application of novel catalysts.

References

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Figure 1
Emissions of CO₂ and CH₄ from anthropogenic sources. For CH₄, emission data (black curve) are plotted from USEPA inventory. For CO₂, emission data (red curve) are plotted from CDIAC [1].
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Figure 2
Schematic of photo- and thermo-coupled catalysis in CO₂ and CH₄ conversion. The schematic shows electrocatalysis, photocatalysis, photoelectrocatalysis and other promising photo/thermo-coupled catalysis in CO₂ (left side) and CH₄ (right side) conversion.
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Figure 3
Schematic mechanism for the photoelectrochemical reduction of CO₂. (a) Electron transfer on hybrid photocatalyst. (b) CO₂ reduction on photo-coupled electrocatalyst. (c) Promising photo-coupled electrocatalyst, for example, metal-porphyrin, metal-phthalocyanine, metal-polyacid complex and other catalysts.

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