Solar overall water splitting (2H2O—>2H2 + O2) to produce H2 fuel is a promising approach to provide clean and renewable energy for human life. But, constructing an efficient system to realize this reaction under sunlight irradiation is still a great challenge.
Recently, we made a breakthrough in achieving solar overall water splitting. We successfully construct a natural-artificial hybrid photosystem with photosystem II enzyme and inorganic photocatalyst Ru/SrTiO3:Rh. This hybrid photosystem is able to harvest visible light to split water into H2 and O2, and it works in direct sunlight irradiation outdoors. The activity of this hybrid photosystem reaches to around 2489 mol H2 (mol PSII)-1 h-1. These results have been published on the journal Nature communications (Wangyin Wang, Jun Chen, Can Li, Wenming Tian, Nature Communications, 2014, 5:4647 doi: 10.1038/ncomms5647). It is the first report of constructing natural-artificial hybrid photosystem for solar overall water splitting.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China. (By Wangyin Wang & Jun Chen)
