Hybrid material based on nanosheets 500x thinner than a human hair can produce hydrogen peroxide

Researchers in the United States have developed a new material to produce hydrogen peroxide more efficiently. Developed by a team led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, the material combines inorganic material with biological components to produce hydrogen peroxide. The team also revealed that hydrogen peroxide is commonly used for disinfecting, bleaching and whitening in a variety of settings from manufacturing to the medicine cabinet. Hybrid material was developed using a technology called nanoarchitectonics Hybrid material developed to produce hydrogen peroxide was achieved using a technology called nanoarchitectonics to convert sunlight, air and water into the valuable chemical. It was also revealed that nanoarchitectonics uses nanoscale building blocks to assemble materials into functional architectures, often drawing inspiration from living systems. “Nanoarchitectonics is on par with artificial intelligence and quantum information science as one of the most important technologies of the 21st century,” said — Jinhyeong Jang, Argonne postdoctoral appointee.“Our work demonstrates that we can use it to tune living systems for functional purposes.”The material the researchers developed is based on layered nanosheets about 200 nanometers thick, approximately 500 times thinner than a human hair. The layers form a hybrid system: bismuth oxychloride, a synthetic semiconducting material, combines with patches of a purple membrane made from a naturally occurring, light-absorbing biological material derived from salt-loving microorganisms called archaea, according to a press release.When light shines on this material, the purple membrane acts like a biological solar panel, capturing light energy. It then drives the movement of protons and electrons at the interface with the bismuth oxychloride. This process helps the semiconductor convert oxygen from the air and water into hydrogen peroxide. The hybrid material produced over five times more hydrogen peroxide than the semiconductor alone, as per the release. System uses only inexpensive, abundant materials “Our system operates at ambient conditions and uses only inexpensive, abundant materials,” said Elena Rozhkova, a scientist at the Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM), a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne. ​ “If we were to do the same reaction industrially, it would require high energy input and more complex catalytic systems. Our approach shows how carefully designed nano-bio interfaces can direct chemical reactions under mild conditions.” Published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the work reports a new nanoarchitectonic system integrating bismuth oxychloride (BiOCl) nanosheets with purple membrane (PM) patches. The research team revealed that the resulting PM–BiOCl hybrid nanosheets efficiently convert dioxygen into hydrogen peroxide through a two-electron and two-proton transfer process under ambient conditions while simultaneously converting ethylene glycol into value-added chemicals.This study presents a nanoarchitectonic approach that leverages the photogenerated charge-carrier dynamics of the archaeal subcellular fractions to modulate the optoelectronic and catalytic capacity limitations of semiconductors.