Abstract
Solar-light-driven reduction of CO2-to-CH4 is a complex process involving multiple elementary reactions and various by-products. Achieving high CH4 activity and selectivity therefore remain a significant challenge. Here we show a bioinspired photocatalyst with flexible dual-metal-site pairs (DMSPs), which exhibit dynamic self-adaptive behaviour to fit mutative C1 intermediates, achieving CO2-to-CH4 photoreduction. The Cu and Ni DMSPs in their respective single-site forms under flexible microenvironment are incorporated into a metal-organic framework (MOF) to afford MOF-808-CuNi. This dramatically boosts CH4 selectivity up to 99.4% (electron basis) and 97.5% (product basis), and results in a high production rate of 158.7 μmol g−1 h−1 with a sacrificial reagent. Density functional theory calculations reveal that the flexible self-adaptive DMSPs can stabilize various C1 intermediates in multistep elementary reactions, leading to highly selective CO2-to-CH4 process. This work demonstrates that efficient and selective heterogeneous catalytic processes can be achieved by stabilizing reaction intermediates via the self-adaptive DMSP mechanism.
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Data availability
The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.
Change history
19 May 2022
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-022-00805-3
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Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by the National Key Projects for Fundamental Research and Development of China (grant no. 2016YFB0600901 C.Z.), National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 22038010 to C.Z., 21978212 to H.H., 21725101 to H.L.J., 22161142001 to H.L.J., 91961119 to D.M. and 21521001 to H.L.J.) and the Science and Technology Plans of Tianjin (grant nos. 18PTSYJC00180 C.Z. and 19PTSYJC00020 H.H.). We thank the 1W1B station for X-ray absorption fine structure measurements at BSRF and Testing Centre of Tiangong University for providing some analytical tests.
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C.Z. and H.L.J. conceived the idea, supervised and directed the project. H.L.J., J.L. and H.H. designed the study. J.L. and H.H. performed the experiments. W.X., X.S. and D.M. performed the theoretical calculations and analysed the DFT data. J.L. and K.S. conducted the DRIFTS and ESR experiments. C.W., L.N. and Y.L. participated in some experiments. C.L. and Y.P. studied the proton source in the photocatalytic product by synchrotron-radiation photoionization–mass spectrometry. J.L., H.H., H.L.J., K.S. and C.Z. cowrote the paper. All authors discussed the results and commented on the paper.
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Peer review information Nature Catalysis thanks Julien Bonin, Mohamad Hmadeh and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Supplementary Information
Supplementary Figs. 1–46, Tables 1–15 and Notes 1–12.
Supplementary Video
Video 1 AIMD simulations.
Supplementary Data 1
Data 1 Atomic coordinates of the initial and final configurations of the trajectories in AIMD simulations.
Supplementary Data 2
Data 2 Coordinates for electronic structure.
Source data
Source Data Fig. 2
TEM observations and structural characterization of MOF-808-CuNi.
Source Data Fig. 3
Photocatalytic CO2 reduction performance.
Source Data Fig. 4
Charge transfer in CO2 photoreduction over MOF-808-CuNi.
Source Data Fig. 5
Detection of the reaction mechanism for the photoreduction of CO2 to CH4.
Source Data Fig. 6
Self-adaptive Cu and Ni sites for the selective photoreduction of CO2 to CH4.
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Li, J., Huang, H., Xue, W. et al. Self-adaptive dual-metal-site pairs in metal-organic frameworks for selective CO2 photoreduction to CH4. Nat Catal 4, 719–729 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-021-00665-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-021-00665-3
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