Photocatalytic water splitting is a new technology for the conversion and utilization of solar energy and has a potential prospect. One important aspect of enhancing the photocatalytic efficiency is how to improve the electron-hole separation. Up to now, there is still no ideal strategy to improve the electron-hole separation. In this article, for metal-free organic photocatalysts, we propose a...

A novel powder handling technique was used to allow the deposition of bismuth tungstate coatings onto commercial titanium dioxide photocatalytic nanoparticles. The coatings were deposited by reactive pulsed DC magnetron sputtering in an argon/oxygen atmosphere. The use of an oscillating bowl with rotary particle propagation, positioned beneath two closed-field planar magnetrons, provided unifor...

The development of efficient photocatalytic routines for producing hydrogen is of great importance as society moves away from energy sources derived from fossil fuels. Recent studies have identified that the addition of metal nanoparticles to TiO2 greatly enhances the photocatalytic performance of these materials towards the reforming of alcohols for hydrogen production. The core-shell structur...

Integrating plasmon resonant nanostructures with photocatalytic semiconductors shows great promise for high efficiency photocatalytic water splitting. However, the electrochemical instability of most III-V semiconductors severely limits their applicability in photocatalysis. In this work, we passivate p-type GaP with a thin layer of n-type TiO2 using atomic layer deposition. The TiO2 passivatio...

An efficient method is developed for the synthesis of single crystalline fibrous phosphorus submicron materials. Via the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) technique, fibrous phosphorus fibers with diameters from ∼150 nm to 2 μm were prepared directly from amorphous red phosphorus. The as-prepared fibrous phosphorus exhibited interesting photocatalytic properties.

National Center for Nanoscience and Tec [email protected]; [email protected] Institute of Materials Physics and Chem University, Shenyang 110004, China Chemistry Department, Brookhaven Nation USA State Key Laboratory of Advance Technolog Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 43 † Electronic supplementary information tables, synthetic procedures, theoretica details for XRD, spectroscopy (XPS, ...

We report the novel synthesis of nanoporous TiO2 nanoparticle ensembles with unique mesoscale morphologies. Constituent nanoparticles evolved into multifaceted assemblies, exhibiting excellent crystallinity and enhanced photocatalytic activity compared with commercial TiO2. Such materials could be exploited for applications, like organic pollutant degradation.

Since the discovery of the Honda-Fujishima effect of water splitting[1] using a titanium dioxide (TiO2) electrode in the early 1970s, numerous studies have been conducted and are still growing on photocatalytic reactions of TiO2. Titanium dioxide serves as a model case for the mechanistic studies of photocatalysis, but it has a serious drawback as a photocatalyst for water splitting: the band g...

Well-defined olive-shaped Bi(2)S(3)/BiVO(4) microspheres were synthesized through a limited chemical conversion route (LCCR), where olive-shaped BiVO(4) microspheres and thioacetamide (TAA) were used as precursors and sulfur source, respectively. The as-synthesized products were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), high-resolution trans...

To test the hypothesis that wood coated with rutile TiO2 nanostructures can undergo degradation because of the photocatalytic activity of TiO2, three sets of wood specimens were aged at an accelerated rate. These three sets consisted of blank wood (BW), HDTMOS/MTMOS-coated wood (WHM), and TiO2/HDTMOS/MTMOS-coated wood (WTHM). After exposure to 155-h UV irradiation, the wettability of WTHM chang...