Efficient combustion of chlorinated volatile organic compounds driven by natural sunlight

Catalytic combustion of chlorinated volatile organic compounds (CVOCs) driven by natural sunlight is the promising CVOCs elimination method, which has not been realized. In this work, we designed a new sunlight-driven catalytic system for CVOCs combustion based on a scalable CuMnCeO_x gel and a new photothermal conversion device. The CVOCs elimination rate of CuMnCeO_x gel was reached to 99% at 250 °C, 25 times higher than that of CuMnCeO_x in bulk form. Further, the new photothermal conversion device could heat the CuMnCeO_x gel to 300 °C under one standard solar irradiation and this joint showed a stable one standard sunlight-driven CVOCs combustion at the rate of 6.8 mmol g^-1 h^-1, which was more than 7.8 times higher than the state of the art of photocatalytic CVOCs decomposition. Moreover, the new sunlight-driven thermal catalytic system was able to stable full oxidize the CVOCs in the concentration from 0.1 to 1000 ppm. Therefore, the natural sunlight-driven thermal CVOCs combustion system with high activity and zero secondary pollution shows the potential for large-scale industrial applications.