Phenyl-triazine oligomers for light-driven hydrogen evolution

By K. Schwinghammer, S. Hug, Maria B. Mesch, J. Senker, Bettina V. Lotsch. 2015

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The design of stable, yet highly tunable organic photocatalysts which orchestrate multi-step electron transfer reactions is at the heart of the newly emerging field of polymer photocatalysis. Covalent triazine frameworks such as the archetypal CTF-1 have been theorized to constitute a new class of photocatalytically active polymers for light-driven water splitting. Here, we revisit the ionothermal synthesis of CTF-1 by trimerization of 1,4-dicyanobenzene catalyzed by the Lewis acid zinc chloride and demonstrate that the microporous black polymer CTF-1 is essentially inactive for hydrogen evolution. Instead, highly photoactive phenyl-triazine oligomers (PTOs) with higher crystallinity as compared to CTF-1 are obtained by lowering the reaction temperature to 300 °C and prolonging the reaction time to >150 hours. The low reaction temperature of the PTOs largely prevents incipient carbonization and thus results in a carbon-to-nitrogen weight ratio close to the theoretical value of 3.43. The oligomers were characterized by MALDI-TOF and quantitative solid-state NMR spectroscopy, revealing variations in size, connectivity and thus nitrile-to-triazine ratios depending on the initial precursor dilution. The most active PTO samples efficiently and stably reduce water to hydrogen with an average rate of 1076 (±278) μmol h−1 g−1 under simulated sunlight illumination, which is competitive with the best carbon nitride-based and purely organic photocatalysts. The photocatalytic activity of the PTOs is found to sensitively depend on the polymerization degree, thus suggesting a prominent role of the unreacted nitrile moieties in the photocatalytic process. Notably, PTOs even show moderate hydrogen production without the addition of any co-catalyst.

Subfields: Inorganic Chemistry, Materials Chemistry, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a6de80338ba5da1870848e87ff92d0dddc42171

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In Inorganic Chemistry

  1. V. Vyas
  2. V. W. Lau
  3. A. Cooper
  4. Reiner Sebastian Sprick
  5. Martijn A. Zwijnenburg
  6. Bettina V. Lotsch
  7. D. Adams

In Materials Chemistry

  1. V. W. Lau
  2. V. Vyas
  3. A. Cooper
  4. Reiner Sebastian Sprick
  5. Bettina V. Lotsch
  6. Martijn A. Zwijnenburg
  7. D. Adams

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

  1. V. Vyas
  2. V. W. Lau
  3. A. Cooper
  4. Reiner Sebastian Sprick
  5. Martijn A. Zwijnenburg
  6. Bettina V. Lotsch

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