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Photocatalytic water splitting

Nature Reviews Methods Primers volume 3, Article number: 42 (2023) Cite this article

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Abstract

With the goal of achieving large-scale H2 production from renewable resources, water splitting into H2 and O2 using semiconductor photocatalysts (sometimes called artificial photosynthesis) has been studied for five decades. Unfortunately, the lack of rigour and reproducibility in the data collection and analysis of experimental results has hindered progress in the field. This Primer provides a comprehensive overview of proper characterization and evaluation of photocatalysts for overall water splitting. In particular, the Primer covers various pitfalls in photocatalysis research, best practices for reproducibility and reliable methods for conducting rigorous experiments. The recommendations are intended to reduce false positives in the literature and to promote progress towards a practical technology for producing H2 from water by using sunlight.

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Fig. 1: Schematic energy diagrams of water-splitting photocatalysts.
Fig. 2: Key technological milestones in overall water splitting by heterogeneous photocatalysts.
Fig. 3: Strategies for developing oxide-based photocatalysts for visible-light water splitting.
Fig. 4: Reaction set-ups for photocatalytic water splitting.
Fig. 5: Mechanistic study of the light intensity dependence of a SrTiO3:Rh/BiVO4 tandem photocatalyst.

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Acknowledgements

S.N. acknowledges support by a Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Start-up (JP21K20555). F.E.O. acknowledges support from the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences (Award Number DOE-SC0015329). X.W. acknowledges support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22032002 and U1905214). T.E.M. acknowledges support from the Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Energy Biosciences, Department of Energy (contract DE-SC0019781). K.M. acknowledges financial support by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) (JP22H01862), a Grant-in-Aid for Transformative Research Areas (A) “Supra-ceramics” (JP22H05148) and a Core-to-Core Program (JPJSCCA20200004) (JSPS).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, School of Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Shunta Nishioka & Kazuhiko Maeda

  2. Department of Chemistry, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    Frank E. Osterloh

  3. State Key Laboratory of Photocatalysis on Energy and Environment, College of Chemistry, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, P. R. China

    Xinchen Wang

  4. Department of Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Thomas E. Mallouk

  5. International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (WPI-MANA), National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

    Thomas E. Mallouk

  6. Living Systems Materialogy (LiSM) Research Group, International Research Frontiers Initiative (IRFI), Tokyo Institute of Technology, Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan

    Kazuhiko Maeda

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  1. Shunta Nishioka
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  2. Frank E. Osterloh
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  3. Xinchen Wang
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  4. Thomas E. Mallouk
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  5. Kazuhiko Maeda
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Contributions

Introduction (S.N., F.E.O., X.W., T.E.M. and K.M.); Experimentation (S.N., F.E.O., X.W., T.E.M. and K.M.); Results (S.N., F.E.O., X.W., T.E.M. and K.M.); Applications (S.N., F.E.O., X.W., T.E.M. and K.M.); Reproducibility and data deposition (S.N., F.E.O., X.W., T.E.M. and K.M.); Limitations and optimizations (S.N., F.E.O., X.W., T.E.M. and K.M.); Outlook (S.N., F.E.O., X.W., T.E.M. and K.M.); Overview of the Primer (S.N., F.E.O., X.W., T.E.M. and K.M.).

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kazuhiko Maeda.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information

Nature Reviews Methods Primers thanks Yingtang Zhou, Ling Piao, Kamalakannan Kailasam and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Glossary

Back reactions

Reactions that can lower the efficiency of photocatalytic water splitting (for example, H2 + ½O2 → H2O).

Black H2

H2 that is produced from bituminous coal via steam reforming, which produces high quantities of CO2.

Conduction band (CB) minimum

The energy region in a semiconductor that corresponds to empty antibonding orbitals and that conducts electrons when present from excitation.

Foreign element

An impurity added to semiconductors to control their characteristics (for example, a metal cation that can contribute d electrons, or an anion that is less electronegative than oxygen).

Grey H2

H2 that is produced from natural gas or methane via steam reforming, which produces lower quantities of CO2.

Merry-go-round system

Samples placed equidistant from the light source are rotated around the light source, and each sample is illuminated with light of the same intensity.

Sacrificial reagents

Fast electron donors or acceptors that may be irreversibly decomposed after reaction and that modify the energetics and rate of the photocatalytic reaction.

Standard hydrogen electrode

(SHE). The hydrogen electrode when the activities of hydrogen gas and proton are both 1.

Valence band (VB) maximum

The energy region in a semiconductor that corresponds to filled bonding orbitals and that conducts holes when present from excitation.

Z-Scheme

A two-step photochemical reaction taking place in plants to utilize lower energy photons and generate sufficient potential to drive photosynthetic reactions, The electron transfer pathway resembles the letter Z.

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Nishioka, S., Osterloh, F.E., Wang, X. et al. Photocatalytic water splitting. Nat Rev Methods Primers 3, 42 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43586-023-00226-x

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