Solar photocatalytic reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) to valuable products such as carbon monoxide, methane, and ethanol has become an appealing approach to mitigate the deleterious impact of the combustion of fossil fuels. Quantum dots (QDs), visible light-sensitive nanomaterials, have been widely studied for converting solar energy into chemical energy due to their light-harvesting properties, compositional tunability, and size-dependent energetics. However, bare QDs suffer from low selectivity toward the reduction of CO2. To improve their catalytic activity, we have doped QDs with nickel(II) cations and interfaced them with ternary metal-intercalated vanadium oxide nanowires (NWs). Within the resulting heterostructures, QDs act as a charge donor, and the NWs exhibit intercalative mid-gap states functioning as a charge acceptor. Although our collaborative team has previously studied this type of heterostructure for hydrogen evolution and water splitting, they remain unexplored for CO2 photoreduction. This presentation will cover the preparation and characterization of heterostructures consisting of cysteine-capped nickel(II)-doped CdS QDs (cys-NiCdS QDs) interfaced with β-Pb0.33V2O5 NWs. The heterostructures are envisioned as a system to selectively reduce CO2 under white-light illumination. This presentation will highlight recent results from materials synthesis and characterization, photophysical and photoelectrochemical assessment of excited-state charge transfer, and photocatalysis using gas chromatography (GC) for product characterization.

Heterostructured photocatalysts of Ni2+ doped CdS quantum dots and β-Pb0.33V2O5 nanowires: Towards selective CO2 reduction

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