Production of hydrogen from photocatalytic water splitting holds promise as an alternative energy source with superiority of cleanliness, environment friendliness, low price, and sustainability. Perfectly constructing the noble-metal-free and stable hybrid structure photocatalyst is quite essential; herein, for the first time the authors aim to use cobalt phosphide as the cocatalyst on titanium oxide to form a novel hybrid structure to enhance the utilization of the photoexcited electrons in redox reactions for improved photocatalytic H evolution activity. Thus, the achieved significantly increased photocatalytic H -evolution rate on the optimized CoP/TiO (8350 µmol h g ) is 11 times higher than that of the pristine TiO . Moreover, this work is expected to spur more insight into synthesizing such novel photofunctional systems, achieving high photocatalytic H evolution activity and sufficient stability for solar-to-chemical conversion and utilization.

Morphological control of covalent organic frameworks (COFs) is particularly interesting to boost their applications; however, it remains a grand challenge to prepare hollow structured COFs (HCOFs) with high crystallinity and uniform morphology. Herein, we report a versatile and efficient strategy of amorphous-to-crystalline transformation for the general and controllable fabrication of highly crystalline HCOFs. These HCOFs exhibited ultrahigh surface areas, radially oriented nanopore channels, quite uniform morphologies, and tunable particle sizes. Mechanistic studies revealed that H2O, acetic acid, and solvent played a crucial role in manipulating the hollowing process and crystallization process by regulating the dynamic imine exchange reaction. Our approach was demonstrated to be applicable to various amines and aldehydes, producing up to 10 kinds of HCOFs. Importantly, based on this methodology, we even constructed a library of unprecedented HCOFs including HCOFs with different pore structures, bowl-like HCOFs, cross-wrinkled COF nanocapsules, grain-assembled HCOFs, and hydrangea-like HCOFs. This strategy was also successfully applied to the fabrication of COF-based yolk–shell nanostructures with various functional interior cores. Furthermore, catalytically active metal nanoparticles were implanted into the hollow cavities of HCOFs with tunable pore diameters, forming attractive size-selective nanoreactors. The obtained metal@HCOFs catalysts showed enhanced catalytic activity and outstanding size-selectivity in hydrogenation of nitroarenes. This work highlights the significance of nucleation-growth kinetics of COFs in tuning their morphologies, structures, and applications.

Semiconductor-based photocatalytic hydrogen (H) evolution from water is of great importance for solar-to-chemical conversion processes to boost and promote the future hydrogen economy. Here, for the first time, we demonstrate that p-CuP coupled with n-TiO forms a novel hybrid structure which accelerates electron-hole pair separation and transfer for improved photocatalytic H-evolution activity. The rate of H evolution of the optimized CuP/TiO (7940 μmol h g) is 11 times higher than that of bare TiO, with an apparent quantum efficiency (AQE) of 4.6%. This work may provide more insight into the synthesis of novel phosphide-based hybrid materials with high photocatalytic H-evolution activity and sufficient stability for solar-to-chemical conversion and utilization.

The well-designed Mo2C/TiO2 hierarchical configuration exhibits extremely high photocatalytic H2 production activity from water splitting.

This work presents a facile, economic and green synthesis of highly active house-of-cards-like ZSM-5 by the addition of N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP) into a template-free zeolite synthesis system.