Publication date: 21st July 2025
Heterogeneous photocatalytic processes suffer from instability when operated for reasonable reaction times, under illumination, and significant deterioration in performance is usually observed. To circumvent some of the main issues causing this decline in activity, arising from reduced light absorption, dispersibility issues, and agglomeration, owing to temporal changes in the electrostatic interactions between individual photocatalyst particles, flow reactions over stable photocatalyst panels are developed. Importantly, to enable such configuration for practical applications, a stable connection between the photocatalyst and the substrate must remain intact under reaction conditions (illumination, flow, heat, in situ generated reactive species, and so forth). Most current methodologies use various forms of binders to maintain a stable attachment of the photocatalyst to the substrate. We have developed a simple method to enhance their photocatalytic stability significantly using a binder-free approach. This method is highly versatile in terms of the photocatalyst used and the plastic substrate nature (on the condition the plastic has a thermoplastic component). Generally, by means of physical adhesion on plastic panels. We embed the photocatalyst onto the surface of various plastics that serve as the support (substrate) via a partial melting process. As a demonstration, we use a variety of plastic supports, such as Polypropylene (PP), Ethylene vinyl-acetate (EVA), Poly (methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), Low-density Polyethylene (LDPE), and High-density polyethylene (HDPE), to deposit various photocatalysts (e.g., Bi2O3, ZnO, WO3, TiO2, and polymeric carbon nitride (CN)). In this work, we show CN|HDPE panels as a case study. CN materials are environmentally friendly1 and are active for ORR2, HER, and other organic conversions. With this method, we were able to achieve stable photocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) activity with an average of ~4.18 mmol h^–1 m^–2 for more than 21 weeks on a single panel. This implies the possibility of significantly improving the stability of many heterogeneous photocatalytic processes with a simple method while using harmful plastic waste instead of disposing of the plastics by incineration or landfilling, which cause air and soil pollution, respectively.
We would like to thank Dr. Nitzan Maman from the Ilse Katz Institute (IKI), for his help with the Focused Ion-beam (FIB) cross-section SEM and SEM-EDS mapping. We further would like to express our gratitude to Dr. Natalya Froumin and Dr. Lee Shelly for their advice and help with XPS measurements. We would like to thank Dr. Vladimir Ezersky for his help and advice with HRTEM and EDS measurements interpretation. We would also like to thank Dr. Nataliia Dudchenko From the Bar Ilan university for contact angle measurements.
Funding:
- This work was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement No. 849068).
- This research was supported by Research Grant Award from BARD, the United States - Israel Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund.
- This project was funded by the Goldman Sonnenfeldt School of Sustainability and Climate Change.
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