On the importance of a bowl of water for Two-Child families: How to balance the piezoelectric coefficient and carrier concentration of material for ultrahigh piezocatalysis?

Piezocatalysis, which is able to convert natural mechanical energy into electrochemical energy, is considered a promising green and sustainable technology. The efficiency is limited by factors such as the piezoelectric properties of the material, the carrier concentration and mobility, and the number of reactive sites. Low carrier concentration will limit the applicability of the material as a piezoelectric catalyst; however, high carrier concentration may affect the orderly arrangement of electric dipoles inside the material, thus destroying its piezoelectric performance to a certain extent. Therefore, balancing the piezoelectric coefficient and carrier concentration of materials is a key in the field of piezocatalysis.

Recently, a team of green energy and catalytic materials scientists led by Professor Da Chen and Professor Laishun Qin joint team from China Jiliang University, highlightly reported the subject of balancing the piezoelectric coefficient and carrier concentration of Bi₂WO_6-x for ultrahigh piezocatalysis. In this work, the correlation and influence between oxygen vacancies and piezocatalytic performance of hydrogen generation were comprehensively analyzed from the aspects of piezoelectric coefficient, carrier concentration, carrier separation and migration mechanisms, and surface catalytic activity. The optimal hydrogen production rate per power of 2.21 g^–1 h^–1 W^–1 is equivalent and even better than that of most reported piezocatalysts. The d₃₃ and N_d as two factors jointly determine the piezocatalytic performance. The findings in this research can provide important and deep-seated insights for better piezocatalysts in future.

The team published their work in Journal of Advanced Ceramics on September 18, 2024.

“In this report, we used a simple one-step solvent heat, that is, Bi₂WO_6-x nanoparticles with different oxygen vacancy concentrations were prepared by adjusting the time and temperature of the ethylene glycol-assisted solvent thermal reaction, to realize the regulation of the material piezoelectric coefficient and carrier concentration, so as to explore the effect of the relationship on the piezocatalytic performance”. said Da Chen, professor from College of Materials and Chemistry at China Jiliang University.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22309170, 51972294, 51972291), the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (LQ24E020003), Open fund project of National-Local Joint Engineering Research Center of Heavy Metals Pollutants Control and Resource Utilization of Nanchang Hangkong University (ES202480182). The authors extend their gratitude to Shiyanjia Lab (www.shiyanjia.com) for providing invaluable assistance with the material characterization analysis.

About Journal of Advanced Ceramics

Journal of Advanced Ceramics (JAC) is an international academic journal that presents the state-of-the-art results of theoretical and experimental studies on the processing, structure, and properties of advanced ceramics and ceramic-based composites. JAC is Fully Open Access, monthly published by Tsinghua University Press, and exclusively available via SciOpen. JAC’s 2023 IF is 18.6, ranking in Top 1 (1/31, Q1) among all journals in “Materials Science, Ceramics” category, and its 2023 CiteScore is 21.0 (top 5%) in Scopus database. ResearchGate homepage: https://www.researchgate.net/journal/Journal-of-Advanced-Ceramics-2227-8508

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