Photocatalytic producing dihydroxybenzenes from phenol enabled by gathering oxygen vacancies in ultrathin porous ZnO nanosheets

As an energy-efficient and environmental friendliness method, solar sunlight-driven photo-oxidation catalysis process for organic chemicals synthesis has gained enormous attention, but still faces huge challenge in developing highly-efficient photocatalysts material. Two-dimensional materials engineering and surface defect engineering of photocatalysts both provide an effective strategy to improve the catalytic activity. Inspired by this pathway, we design and synthesize ultrathin porous ZnO nanosheets featuring abundant oxygen vacancies specific to producing dihydroxybenzenes based on a photocatalytic oxidation process. Several valid characterizations had been employed to discern the structural character of the obtained model catalyst, revealing that the resultant ZnO sheets afford an average thickness of 3 nm, and abundant surface porosity, thereby contributing to the rich oxygen vacancies. Such a structure could generate a synergistic effect to enhance the optical absorption and improve the transportation rate of photogenerated charge carriers from the materials design. As expected, the specific ultrathin ZnO nanosheets exhibited a greatly-improved photocatalytic activity for oxidation of phenol to dihydroxybenzenes (31.5% conversion & almost 76.7% selectivity of DHB), near 3 and 4 times higher, respectively than its counterparts that one with few oxygen vacancies and Bulk-ZnO. Impressively, the obtained catalyst showed durable catalytic activity without any activity loss during the five recycling. Finally, the feasible oxidation mechanism was proposed and testified by the controlled scavenger experiments. This study provides a novel reference on how to design high-performance photocatalytic material.