Confinement Aided Simultanous Water Cleaning and Energy Harvesting Using Atomically Thin Wurtzite (Wurtzene)

Abstract Syntheses of few‐layered piezocatalysts from nonlayered materials have gained a huge attention of attention in recent years due to their potential applicability in efficient removal of toxic elements from water. Here, a simple scalable bottom up approach consisting of wet‐chemical synthesis method is used to produce the atomically thin (2D)‐wurtzite ZnO: “wurtzene.” The presence of a large number of well‐distributed surface defects in the synthesized wurtzene promotes the separation of charge carriers in it via the excellent piezo‐photocatalytic activity and thereby the efficiency of degradation of a test dye (namely methylene blue) is enhanced by ≈5 times. By taking an innovative approach, a piezoelectric driven power cell is also fabricated by using the wurtzene and the highest open circuit voltage is found out to be ≈40 V at 1.0 kPa of applied periodic pressure. The experimental observations are explained with density functional theory calculation. The confinement effect due to reduced dimension plays a crucial role in the wurtzene's excellent piezoelectric response. It is envisioned that the present findings will provided a clear insight into the synthesis of wurtzene with surface defects for highly efficient sunlight driven photocatalytic activity as well as piezoelectric energy harvesting.