The development of clean and renewable energy materials as alternatives to fossil fuels is foreseen as a potential solution to the crucial problems of environmental pollution and energy shortages. Hydrogen is an ideal energy material for the future, and water splitting using solar/electrical energy is one way to generate hydrogen. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of porous materials ...

Over the past few decades, two-dimensional (2D) and layered materials have emerged as new fields. Due to the zero-band-gap nature of graphene and the low photocatalytic performance of MoS2, more advanced semiconducting 2D materials have been prompted. As a result, semiconductor black phosphorus (BP) is a derived cutting-edge post-graphene contender for nanoelectrical application, because of its...

Semiconductor based photocatalytic process is of great potential for solving the fossil fuels depletion and environmental pollution. Loading cocatalysts for the modification of semiconductors could increase the separation efficiency of the photogenerated hole-electron pairs, enhance the light absorption ability of semiconductors, and thus obtain new composite photocatalysts with high activities...

Heterostructured photocatalysts comprised of microcrystalline (mc-) cores and nanostructured (ns-) shells were prepared by the sol-gel method. The ability of titania-coated ATiO3 (A = Fe, Pb) and AFeO3 (A = Bi, La, Y) catalysts to degrade methylene blue in visible light (λ > 420 nm) was compared. The catalysts with the titanate cores had enhanced photocatalytic activities for methylene blue deg...

We report on a new approach for the synthesis of TiO2-pillared montmorillonite, where the pillars exhibit a high degree of crystallinity (nanocrystals) representing a mixture of anatase and rutile phases. The structures exhibit improved adsorption and photocatalytic activity as a result of hydrothermally activated intercalation of titanium polyhydroxo complexes (i.e., TiCl4 hydrolysis products)...

The synthesis, structure, and photocatalytic water splitting performance of two new titania (TiO2)/gold(Au)/Bombyx mori silk hybrid materials are reported. All materials are monoliths with diameters of up to ca. 4.5 cm. The materials are macroscopically homogeneous and porous with surface areas between 170 and 210 m2/g. The diameter of the TiO2 nanoparticles (NPs) - mainly anatase with a minor ...

As co-catalyst materials, metal nanoparticles (NPs) play crucial roles in heterogeneous photocatalysis. The photocatalytic performance strongly relies on the physical properties (i.e., composition, microstructure, and surface impurities) of the metal NPs. Here we report a convenient chemical vapour impregnation (CVI) approach for the deposition of monometallic-, alloyed, and core-shell structur...

Photocatalysts are important for environmental cleanup of undesirable organic compounds and have potential applications for solar fuel generation either through water splitting or CO2 reduction [1]. It is now recognized that atomic level in-situ observations of catalytic materials are critical for understanding the structure-reactivity in catalysts. For photocatalysts, this requires that the sy...

Textile industries discharge a large quantity of colored wastewater which is harmful to the ecosystem. In this study, two kinds of dyes were investigated: the mono azo Acid Orange 7 (AO7) and diazo Reactive Green 19 (RG19). The photocatalytic degradation of single (AO7, RG19) azo dye and binary (AO7 and RG19 mixture) azo dye aqueous solutions was photocatalyzed by commercial titanium dioxide (T...

BiOBr uniform flower-like hollow microsphere and porous nanosphere structures have been successfully synthesized through a one-pot EG-assisted solvothermal process in the presence of reactable ionic liquid 1-hexadecyl-3-methylimidazolium bromide ([C(16)mim]Br). The as-prepared samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), scanning electron micros...