Development of Novel Photocatalyst and Cocatalyst Materials for Water Splitting under Visible Light

Solar Water Splitting: Photocatalyst Materials Discovery and Systems Development

111 oriented gold nanoplatelets on multilayer graphene as visible light photocatalyst for overall water splitting

Development of renewable fuels from solar light appears as one of the main current challenges in energy science. A plethora of photocatalysts have been investigated to obtain hydrogen and oxygen from water and solar light in the last decades. However, the photon-to-hydrogen molecule conversion is still far from allowing real implementation of solar fuels. Here we show that 111 facet-oriented go...

Semihydrogenated BN Sheet: A Promising Visible-light Driven Photocatalyst for Water Splitting

Based on first principles calculations, we predict semihydrogenated graphitic BN (sh-BN) sheet is a potential metal-free visible-light driven photocatalyst for water splitting. The ground state of sh-BN is a strip-like antiferromagnetic semiconductor with a band gap suitable for visible-light absorption. The redox potentials of water splitting are all located inside the band gap and the probabi...

An efficient dye-sensitized BiOCl photocatalyst for air and water purification under visible light irradiation.

A photosensitized BiOCl catalyst was found to be effective for photocatalytic water purification and air remediation under visible light irradiation (λ > 420 nm). Prepared by a solvothermal method, the BiOCl crystals possessed a 3D hierarchical spherical structure with the highly active facets exposed. When sensitized by Rhodamine B (RhB), the photocatalyst system was more active than N-doped T...

A visible-light-induced overall water-splitting photocatalyst: conduction-band-controlled silver tantalate.

Visible-light-induced water splitting was achieved by increasing the visible-light sensitivity of AgTaO3, by the introduction of Nb, generating AgTa1-xNbxO3. After grafting NiO onto AgTa0.7Nb0.3O3, simultaneous, catalytic liberation of H2 and O2 at a molar ratio of ∼2 : 1 was achieved from pure water under only visible-light irradiation.