Isolation Strategy towards Earth-Abundant Single-Site Co-Catalysts for Photocatalytic Hydrogen Evolution Reaction

Achieving efficient photocatalytic water splitting remains one of the most vital challenges in the photocatalysis field, as the performance of contemporary heterogeneous catalysts is still limited by their insufficient activity and low predictability. To address this challenge, this work takes inspiration from the concept of heterogeneous single-metal-site catalysts (HSMSCs) and follows the idea of site-isolation, aiming towards single-site co-catalyst species and a higher atom-utilization efficiency. We synthesized a set of photocatalysts through an adsorption-limited wet impregnation process using bare and phosphate-modified TiO2 as model supports and earth-abundant metals (Cu and Ni) with various loadings (0.008–5 wt.%) as co-catalyst species. The catalysts are characterized by TXRF for the determination of the real co-catalyst loadings, UV-vis and FTIR spectroscopes for semi-quantitative analysis of the metal state and binding modes to the substrate, and HRTEM for resolving the morphology of the sample’s surface. All samples were then evaluated towards the photocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). We show that much higher turnover frequencies (TOFs) are obtained for both Cu- and Ni-based systems when lower co-catalyst loadings are used, which indicates an improved atom-utilization efficiency that reaches performances comparable to the noble Au co-catalyst. We also introduce a structural model to explain the observed TOF trends, which confirms that both earth-abundant systems undergo a strong structural reconstruction upon site-isolation towards smaller, perhaps even single-site-like species.