Boosting electrocatalytic hydrogen generation by a renewable porous wood membrane decorated with Fe-doped NiP alloys

Porous biomass electrodes have emerged as a critical material for electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction(HER).However,most approaches for synthesizing porous electrodes from biomass require high energy consumption,which is resulted from the smash of biomass and the undergoing of serial assembly.Herein,a self-supported wood-derived"breathable"membrane is utilized directly as electrodes for highefficient HER via an assembly of Fe-doped NiP alloys.The well-designed hierarchical porous structures in natural wood membrane(NWM)are unusually beneficial for electrolytes accessibility and hydrogen gas removal.The obtained wood-derived membrane exhibits a high electrocatalytic activity and good cycling durability in acidic and alkaline electrolytes.Remarkably,the Fe_(0.074) NiP alloys/NWM electrode affords a large current density of 100 m A cm^(-2) at extremely low overpotentials of 168 mV in acidic electrolyte and174 m V in alkaline electrolyte.Density functional theory calculations unveil that the Fe atom doped in NiP alloys can create much more charge accumulation around Fe and Ni active sites,which helps decrease the △GH_(*)and △G_(H2O)and significantly promote the HER process.This new insight will promote further explorations of economic,high-efficient,and biodegradable wood-derived electrocatalysts for HER.

Bioinspired C/TiO_2 photocatalyst for rhodamine B degradation under visible light irradiation

Papilio paris butterfly wings were replicated by a sol-gel method and a calcination process, which could take advantage of the spatial features of the wing to enhance their photocatalytic properties. Hierarchical structures of P. paris-carbon-TiO_2(PP-C-TiO_2) were confirmed by SEM observations. By applying the Brunauer-Emmett-Teller method, it was concluded that in the presence of wings the product shows higher surface area with respect to the pure TiO_2 made in the absence of the wings. The higher specific surface area is also beneficial for the improvement of photocatalytic property.Furthermore, the conduction and valence bands of the PPC-TiO_2 are more negative than the corresponding bands of pure TiO_2, allowing the electrons to migrate from the valence band to the conduction band upon absorbing visible light. That is, the presence of C originating from wings in the PP-C-TiO_2 could extend the photoresponsiveness to visible light. This strategy provides a simple method to fabricate a high-performance photocatalyst,which enables the simultaneous control of the morphology and carbon element doping.