Organic Photovoltaic Catalyst with Extended Exciton Diffusion for High-Performance Solar Hydrogen Evolution

摘要

The short exciton diffusion length (L D) associated with most classical organic photocatalysts (5–10 nm) imposes severe limits on photocatalytic hydrogen evolution efficiency. Here, a photovoltaic molecule (F1) without electron-deficient units at the central building block was designed and synthesized to improve the photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY). With the enhanced PLQY of 9.3% and a large integral spectral overlap of 3.32 × 1016 nm4 M–1 cm–1, the average L D of F1 film increases to 20 nm, nearly twice the length of the control photovoltaic molecule (Y6). Then, the single-component organic nanoparticles (SC-NPs) based on F1 show an optimized average hydrogen evolution rate (HER) of 152.60 mmol h–1 g–1 under AM 1.5G sunlight (100 mW cm–2) illumination for 10 h, which is among the best results for photocatalytic hydrogen evolution.