Development of inorganic nanomaterials with advanced electrochemical and photochemical functions

Abstract

To address the increasing global concerns in energy crisis and climate change, inorganic nanomaterial has been widely studied as an essential material category owing to their unique electrochemical and photochemical properties. The design of novel material together with property study and performance evaluation appears to be extremely important especially for the application of the inorganic nanomaterials in electrocatalysis and photocatalysis to tackle the energy issue. My thesis research is directed at the development and understanding of novel functional inorganic nanomaterials and study their applications in electrocatalytic water splitting and photo-induced reconstruction and self-healing reactions. The thesis is divided into 6 chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the background of the current research status and outlines the motivation and objectives of my thesis work. Chapter 2 introduces the experimental techniques used in my experiments. Major findings are shown in Chapter 3 to 5, and conclusions and outlooks are summarized in Chapter 6. Firstly, I synthesized Cu-supported Ni₄Mo nanodot on MoO_x nanosheet catalyst with controllable Ni₄Mo particle size and d-band structure via a one-step electrodeposition process. Secondly, I proposed a strategy to fabricate highly efficient bifunctional electrocatalyst for water splitting by integrating the most active hydrogen evolution and oxygen evolution counterparts together with boosted activities of both of the half reactions. Thirdly, for the application of semiconducting materials in photocatalysis, photochemical property study and further understanding of the photoexcited carriers’ behavior is another essential aspect in addition to catalytic activity evaluation. Overall, the design and study of unique functional inorganic nanomaterials for electrochemical as well as photochemical applications open unprecedented opportunities for understanding their structure-property relationship.

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology