Recently, the Green Carbon Resource Utilization Team, led by Professors Xiao Rui and Zhang Huiyan from the School of Energy and Environment, SEU, has published their latest research achievement, titled “Tuned Oxidation Potential of Continuous Defective Photocatalyst for Selective Biomass Conversion”, in the internationally renowned journal Advanced Science.
As the most abundant renewable carbon resource on the Earth, biomass serves as an ideal alternative to fossil feedstocks to meet the growing demand for materials and energy. Photocatalysis, featured by mild reaction conditions and solar-driven reactivity, provides a sustainable strategy for converting biomass into fuels and high-value-added chemicals. However, due to the complex structure, diverse functional groups, and highly competitive reaction pathways of biomass, it remains a major challenge to achieve the targeted production of high-value products.
In this work, the team developed a catalytic system that oxidizes biomass in a graded manner using different spectral wavelengths to produce fuels and high-value chemicals, realizing the directional conversion of biomass and efficient utilization of solar energy. The unique mechanism of regulating key active species through self-tunable photo-oxidation capacity was also revealed. Using xylose (a biomass derivative) as a probe reaction, the results show that the main product under visible light is high-value-added xylonic acid (an important additive in food, medicine, and chemical industries), while under UV light, the main products are low-value C1 products (CO₂, CO, and formic acid). This system not only broadens the utilization range of solar spectral energy but also avoids side reactions such as over-oxidation, enabling the preparation of high-value products with high selectivity and high yield. Both experimental and theoretical results demonstrate that tuning the solar wavelength can excite different defect energy levels of the catalyst, providing matched oxidation potentials for xylose oxidation. In addition, this photo-tunable oxidation system also exhibits remarkable directional selectivity for the conversion of other biomass derivatives, offering a new pathway for the solar-driven efficient conversion of biomass resources.
Hong Longfei, a Ph.D. candidate, and Prof. Zhang Huiyan are the co-first authors of the paper, while Professors Zhang Huiyan, Xiao Rui, and Chu Sheng are the co-corresponding authors, and SEU is the sole affiliation of the paper. In recent years, supported by the National Key R&D Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and other projects, the research team led by Professors Xiao Rui and Zhang Huiyan has made a series of important progress in the high-value utilization of biomass and organic solid waste. They have proposed a new method to introduce various energies such as photoelectricity, microwave, and plasma into the traditional thermal conversion process to form complementary coupling, so as to achieve carbon-neutral/carbon-negative high-value conversion under mild conditions. Relevant achievements have been published in Science, Nature Reviews Materials, PNAS, Science Advances, Nature Communications, and other top journals, and a number of technologies have been industrialized.
Paper link:https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202523412
Translated by: Melody Zhang
Edited by: Leah Li
