Inspiration from nature’s repertoire to organize and assemble materials on length scales, or biomimic nature’s elaborate architectures or systems to design and construct complicated structures with related functions, has brought about a promising area of bio-inspired materials and systems. Inspired by nature, we developed several bioinspired materials from structural design principles. We demonstrate a design strategy for a promising 3D artificial photosynthetic system architecture as an efficient mass flow/light harvesting network relying on the morphological replacement of a concept prototype-leaf’s 3D architecture into perovskite titanates for CO2 photoreduction into hydrocarbon fuels (mainly CO and CH4). Further, we demonstrate a 3D printing strategy for artificial micro-leaf with 3D architectures spanning seven orders of magnitude from nanometres to centimetres, in a rapid, programmable and scalable manner. Artificial photosynthesis via CO2 reduction enhance up to 2 folds and 6 folds improvement of CO and CH4 evolution on 3D printed APS compared with the corresponding powder counterparts. The strategy shows its critical importance and obvious advantages in the potential scale-up of 3D APS device manufacturing. We report the demonstration of a new strategy, based on adopting nature’s NIR light responsive architectures, for an efficient far red-to-NIR plasmonic hybrid photocatalytic system. The system is constructed by controlled assembly of light-harvesting plasmonic nanoantennas (gold nanorods) on a typical photocatalytic unit having butterfly wings’ 3D architectures. Experiments and FDTD simulations demonstrate the structural effects on obvious far red-to-NIR photocatalysis enhancement which originates from the synergetic effects of (1) Enhancing far red-to-NIR light harvesting ability, up to 25%. (2) Enhancing electric-field amplitude of localized surface plasmon to more than 3.5 times than that of the non-structured one.

Nature inspired functional materials for solar energy manipulation and conversion

255th National Meeting (2018)

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