Gold–rhodium nanoflowers for the plasmon-enhanced hydrogen evolution reaction under visible light

Rodrigues, Maria Paula de Souza, Dourado, Andre H. B., Cutolo, Leonardo de O., Parreira, Luanna S., Alves, Tiago Vinicius, Slater, Thomas J. A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0372-1551, Haigh, Sarah J., Camargo, Pedro H. and Cordoba de Torresi, Susana Ines 2021. Gold–rhodium nanoflowers for the plasmon-enhanced hydrogen evolution reaction under visible light. ACS Catalysis 11 (21) , pp. 13543-13555. 10.1021/acscatal.1c02938

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (6MB)

Abstract

State of the art electrocatalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) are based on metal nanoparticles (NPs). It has been shown that the localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) excitation in plasmonic NPs can be harvested to accelerate a variety of molecular transformations. This enables the utilization of visible light as an energy input to enhance HER performances. However, most metals that are active toward the HER do not support LSPR excitation in the visible or near-IR ranges. We describe herein the synthesis of gold–rhodium core–shell nanoflowers (Au@Rh NFs) that are composed of a core made up of spherical Au NPs and shells containing Rh branches. The Au@Rh NFs were employed as a model system to probe how the LSPR excitation from Au NPs can lead to an enhancement in the HER performance for Rh. Our data demonstrate that the LSPR excitation at 533 nm (and 405 nm) leads to an improvement in the HER performance of Rh, which depends on the morphological features of the Au@Rh NFs, offering opportunities for optimization of the catalytic performance. Control experiments indicate that this improvement originates from the stronger interaction of Au@Rh NFs with H2O molecules at the surface, leading to an icelike configuration, which facilitated the HER under LSPR excitation.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Chemistry
Publisher:	American Chemical Society
ISSN:	2155-5435
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	8 February 2022
Date of Acceptance:	30 June 2021
Last Modified:	23 May 2023 13:47
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/147184

Citation Data

Cited 28 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item