🧪 CO₂ electrochemical reduction

The Carbon Dioxide Reduction Reaction (CO2RR) and photocatalytic hydrogen production are key technologies for realizing artificial photosynthesis and net-zero emission goals. Driven by solar energy or green electricity, photo/electrocatalysts can convert the greenhouse gas CO2 into value-added chemicals and hydrocarbon fuels (such as methanol, acetaldehyde, ethylene, or CO), and split water to produce clean green hydrogen. This not only effectively addresses the energy crisis caused by fossil fuel depletion but also fundamentally reduces carbon emissions, achieving a win-win situation for both environmental protection and sustainable energy development. Our laboratory is dedicated to developing highly efficient and stable photo/electrocatalysts to advance this field. In our recent breakthroughs, we developed vanadium-substituted MoS2 ultrathin films, utilizing V-S vacancy pairs as active catalytic sites to boost the photocatalytic CO2-to-CO reduction yield to 5 times that of pristine MoS2. Furthermore, we employed an ultrathin polydopamine (PDA) conformal coating on copper microcubes to effectively suppress catalyst surface reconstruction during electrochemical CO2RR and stabilize key reaction intermediates, achieving an impressive Faradaic efficiency of 81.6% for C2 products (such as ethylene). In terms of metal-free photocatalysts, we successfully integrated conducting polymer nanoparticles (P3HT) with graphene oxide (GO) to form a bulk heterojunction, which resolved the material incompatibility issue and significantly enhanced the visible-light-driven, highly selective conversion of CO2 into methanol and acetaldehyde.