Oxygen Vacancy Induced Boosted Visible-Light Driven Photocatalytic CO₂ Reduction and Electrochemical Water Oxidation...

Herein, the obtained Cu_0.5 Co_0.5 -ZIF@Fe₂ O₃ @CC-150 heterojunction (termed as Cu_{1- x} Co_x -ZFC-150) showed high hydrogen and oxygen evolution reaction (HER and OER) activities with low overpotential small Tafel slope. When employed to be the bifunctional anode and cathode, they only needed a cell voltage of 1.62 V. The composite also exhibited excellent photocatalytic performance on CO₂ evolution into CO and CH₄ . The enhanced OER kinetics and Z-scheme charge transfer model for photocatalytic property have been discussed based on the experiments and density functional theory (DFT) analysis. The optimized phase interfaces, abundant active sites, optional oxygen vacancy, and adjusted Gibbs free energy were beneficial for the fast electron/ion transport enhancing the water splitting performance.