Metal sulfides-based nanomaterials have been used as a class of efficient solar driven photocatalysts. However, the H₂-production rate observed over these photocatalysts remains problematic. Here, the AgInS₂-xAg₂S-yZnS-zIn₆S₇ (x, y, z = 0 or 1) nanocomposites with controlled compositions have been successfully prepared by a simple hydrothermal method with AgI polyhedrons as silver source. The o...

Photocatalyst arrays of a number of metal oxides were prepared by dispensing metal precursor solutions onto fluorine-doped tin oxide-coated glass followed by annealing at 500 °C for 3 h. These were screened by scanning electrochemical microscopy with a scanning optical fiber, and the results showed that all Sn-doped Cd-In-Bi, Zn-In, and W-Cd oxide photocatalysts produced enhanced photocurrents ...

Ti3+ species are highly unstable in air owing to their facile oxidation into Ti4+ species, and thus they cannot concentrate in the surface layer of TiO2 but are mainly present in its bulk. We report generation of abundant and stable Ti3+ species in the surface layer of TiO2 by boron doping for efficient utilization of solar irradiation. The resultant photocatalysts (denoted as B-TiO2-x) exhibit...

The photocatalytic behaviour of a series of ammonium fluoride (NH(4)F)-doped titania (TiO(2)) photocatalysts was investigated in the decomposition of acetic acid in aqueous suspensions and in the gas phase mineralization of acetaldehyde. Very similar photocatalytic activity trends, usually increasing with increasing the calcination temperature for a given nominal dopant amount, were obtained fo...

Tandem "Z-scheme" approaches to solar-to-chemical production afford the ability to independently develop and optimize reductive photocatalysts for CO2 reduction to multicarbon compounds and oxidative photocatalysts for O2 evolution. To connect the two redox processes, molecular redox shuttles, reminiscent of biological electron transfer, offer an additional level of facile chemical tunability t...

In this work, nano-photocatalysts based on ZnS quantum dots (QD) functionalized by chitosan were developed using “green” colloidal chemical process in aqueous media at room temperature. The ZnS/chitosan nano-photocatalysts were extensively characterized and the results demonstrated that chitosan was an effective capping ligand for the direct production of water-soluble ZnS QDs with average nano...

The sol-gel process is a wet-chemical technique (chemical solution deposition), which has been widely used in the fields of materials science, ceramic engineering, and especially in the preparation of photocatalysts. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are prevalent components of indoor air pollution. Among the approaches to remove VOCs from indoor air, photocatalytic oxidation (PCO) is regarded ...

Molecular Modeling methods play a very important role in TiO₂ photocatalysis. Recent advances in TiO₂ photocatalysis have produced a number of interesting surface phenomena, reaction products, and various novel visible light active photocatalysts with improved properties. Quantum mechanical calculations appear promising as a means of describing the mechanisms and the product distributions of th...

Finding active sites for photocatalytic reduction and oxidation allows the mechanistic understanding of a given reaction, ensuring the rational design and fabrication of an efficient photocatalyst. Herein, using well-shaped Cu2WS4 decahedra as model photocatalysts, we demonstrated that photoinduced oxidative etching could be considered as an indication of the photooxidation reaction sites of ch...

The elimination of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at low concentration is a subject of great interest because these compounds are very harmful for the environment and human health. In this work, we have developed a synthesis methodology of TiO₂ that allows obtaining meso-macroporous materials with hierarchical porosity and with high thermal stability for their application as photocatalysts i...