Photocatalytic Hydrogen Evolution from Artificial Seawater Splitting over Amorphous Carbon Nitride: Optimization and Process Parameters Study via Response Surface Modeling

Photocatalytic water splitting has garnered tremendous attention for its capability to produce clean and renewable H(2) fuel from inexhaustible solar energy. Until now, most research has focused on scarce pure water as the source of H(2), which is not consistent with the concept of sustainable energy. Hence, the importance of photocatalytic splitting of abundant seawater in alleviating the issue of pure water shortages. However, seawater contains a wide variety of ionic components which have unknown effects on photocatalytic H(2) production. This work investigates photocatalytic seawater splitting conditions using environmentally friendly amorphous carbon nitride (ACN) as the photocatalyst. The individual effects of catalyst loading (X(1)), sacrificial reagent concentration (X(2)), salinity (X(3)), and their interactive effects were studied via the Box–Behnken design in response surface modeling towards the H(2) evolution reaction (HER) from photocatalytic artificial seawater splitting. A second-order polynomial regression model is predicted from experimental data where the variance analysis of the regressions shows that the linear term (X(1), X(2)), the two-way interaction term X(1)X(2), and all the quadratic terms (X(12), X(22), X(23)) pose significant effects towards the response of the HER rate. Numerical optimization suggests that the highest HER rate is 7.16 µmol/h, achievable by dosing 2.55 g/L of ACN in 45.06 g sea salt/L aqueous solution containing 17.46 vol% of triethanolamine. Based on the outcome of our findings, an apparent effect of salt ions on the adsorption behavior of the photocatalyst in seawater splitting with a sacrificial reagent has been postulated.