Photothermal Synergistic Catalysis over Defective ZnInS for CO Fixation.

Carbon dioxide (CO) cycloaddition not only produces highly valued cyclic carbonate but also utilizes CO as C1 resources with 100% atomic efficiency. However, traditional catalytic routes still suffer from inferior catalytic efficiency and harsh reaction conditions. Developing multienergy-field catalytic technology with expected efficiency offers great opportunity for satisfied yield under mild conditions. Herein, ZnInS with sulfur vacancies (S) was fabricated with the assistance of cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB), which is further employed for photothermally driven CO cycloaddition first. Photoluminescence spectroscopy and photoelectrochemical characterization demonstrated its superior separation kinetics of photoinduced carriers induced by defect engineering. The temperature-programmed desorption (TPD) technique indicated its excellent Lewis acidity-basicity characters. Due to the combination of above merits from photocatalysis and thermal catalysis, defective ZnInS-S achieved a yield as high as 73.2% for cyclic carbonate at 80 °C under blue LED illumination within 2 h (apparent quantum yield of 0.468% under illumination of 380 nm monochromatic light at 36 mW·cm), which is 2.9, 2.0, and 6.9 times higher than that in dark conditions and those of pristine ZnInS and industrial representative tetrabutylammonium bromide (TBAB) thermal-catalysis process under the same conditions, respectively. The synergistic reaction path of photocatalysis and thermal catalysis was discriminated by theoretical calculation. This work provides new insights into the photothermal synergistic catalysis CO cycloaddition with defective ternary metal sulfides.