Engineering approach toward catalyst design for solar photocatalytic CO2 reduction: A critical review.

Summary: Solar‐driven converting CO2 to value‐added chemicals can not only address the ever‐growing energy crisis, but also simultaneously mitigate CO2 emission. Although much progress has been made in the last decade, it still remains great challenge to achieve the efficient reduction of CO2 with desirable productivity and high product selectivity because CO2 is a thermodynamically stable and inert molecule with large bond energy. Design and synthesis of efficient catalyst play a pivotal role in promoting the activity and selectivity of photocatalytic CO2 reduction. Apart from the active sites engineering, manipulation of the charge separation and light harvesting efficiency or prolonging the lifetime of photogenerated carriers also greatly matters. Consequently, this review summarizes recent advances in photocatalyst design for CO2 conversion from two major aspects, namely active sites engineering and carriers lifespan prolonging. Firstly, we sort out the fundamental principles and merits of artificial photosynthesis in order to provide readers with a current snapshot of this rapidly developed field. Subsequently, various catalyst engineering strategies, including doping, alloying, Z‐scheme structure construction, are discussed in detail. Finally, some challenging issues as well as insights into the future development of artificial photosynthesis are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]