Photocatalytic Hydrogen Generation from Seawater using High Performance Polymeric Materials

Recently, there has been renewed interest in the use of solar energy as a resource to meet the world’s energy needs in an environmentally sustainable way. Hence, our research focuses on the generation of hydrogen from non-fresh water using the sun as an energy source. The research aims to characterize, assess, and developed new research-grade materials and commercial photocatalysts that can achieve sunlight-driven unassisted photo-splitting of water. In this work, novel conjugated polymer nanoparticles were developed and characterized. The nanoparticles are composed of a donor-acceptor system where two acceptors (A1 and A2) were developed and tested, and different ratios of each donor-acceptor system were assessed. The use of platinum or molybdenum as co-catalysts was explored. Hydrogen evolution reactions with ascorbic acid as sacrificial reagent was performed using these materials and their performance was assessed. The results show that the first system consisting of acceptor A1 and the donor (A1/D) produces more hydrogen than the (A2/D) system. Furthermore, the best ratio of donor to acceptor was determined to be 10:90 for the (A1/D) system. The use of platinum as a co-catalyst was shown to result in a better performance in terms of hydrogen production compared to the use of molybdenum. Furthermore, the results show that the use of nanoparticles suspended in solution results in a higher hydrogen evolution rate compared to the use of films. Hydrogen production of 2018 micromole per hour of catalyst was achieved using the A1/D nanoparticle system with platinum, which represents the best result as initial findings. For future steps, optimization of the reaction will take place to generate more hydrogen