基于Cu/TiO₂/C-Wood复合材料的聚光太阳能驱动自漂浮高效海水汽化催化分解制氢体系

Utilizing abundant and readily available solar and seawater resources to provide sustainable and clean energy to mankind is a far-reaching exploration. In this work, we have designed and synthesized the self-floating solar photothermal composite (Cu/TiO₂/C-Wood) that possesses efficiently full-spectrum solar energy capture and photothermic properties for highly targeted interfacial phase transition reactions that are synergistically favorable for both seawater desalination and hydrogen production. Among them, carbonized wood with abundant microchannel and extremely light mass is used as self-floating carrier to rapidly transports liquid water to localized heating interface by capillary and photothermal effects to achieve effective seawater desalination and water steam production. The plasmonic Cu loaded TiO₂ nanoparticles as catalytic active components trigger surface-dominated photothermally catalytic hydrogen evolution of water steam, realizing the dual-function seawater desalination and synergistic hydrogen production. The hydrogen evolution rate of Cu/TiO₂/C-Wood composite is 179 µmol·h^-1·cm^-2 (35.8 mmol·h^-1·g^-1) under 15 kW·m^-2 and remains basically unchanged after being used 5 times. More importantly, the experimental results show that the main component in seawater-sodium chloride can promote the hydrogen production performance by synergistically concentrated irradiation and self-floating phase transfer process, which breaks the bottleneck of seawater hydrogen production technology, confirming the promising application potential of the self-floating two-phase photo-thermo-catalytic system in large-scale, green and sustainable solar hydrogen production from seawater.