A photocatalyst consisting of nanostructured Pd photochemically deposited on 20 nm TiO2 displays a reaction half-life for rhodamine b decolourisation of 0.5 minute compared to the 9.4 minutes for unmodified P25 under identical reaction conditions. We associate this increased decolourisation rate to the increase in solar light harvesting which we have measured at 8% due to a significant red shif...

Organic nanostructures in terms of porphyrin building blocks have shown great potential in visible-light photocatalytic applications because of their optical, electrical, and catalytic properties. Graphenes are known to provide a high-quality two-dimensional (2D) support for inorganic semiconductor nanostructures to increase the adsorption capability of the photocatalysts and an electron-transf...

This paper reports the synthesis of a new type of Au@TiO2 yolk-shell nanostructures by integrating ion sputtering method with atomic layer deposition (ALD) technique and its applications as visible light-driven photocatalyst and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) substrate. Both the size and amount of gold nanoparticles confined in TiO2 nanotubes could be facilely controlled via properl...

Titania is the most widely studied photocatalyst. In its mixed-phase configuration ( anatase–rutile form) – as manifested in the commercially available P25 Degussa material – titania was previously found to exhibit the best photocatalytic properties reported for the pure system. A great deal of published research by various workers in the field has not fully explained the underlying mechanism f...

The efficiency of nanostructured photocatalysts continues to improve at an impressive pace and is closing in on those needed for commercial applications; however, present-day reactor strategies used to deploy these nanostructures fail to achieve the sufficient areas (>1 m(2)) needed for solar application. Here we report the Self-assembled Nanoparticle-stabilized Photocatalytic Reactor (SNPR), a...

TiO2-SiO2-Ag composites are fabricated by depositing TiO2 films on silica substrates embedded with Ag nanoparticles. Enhancement of light absorption of the nanostructural composites is observed. The light absorption enhancement of the synthesized structure in comparison to TiO2 originated from the near-field enhancement caused by the plasmonic effect of Ag nanoparticles, which can be demonstrat...

Co3O4 nanoparticles were synthesized via a simple Co-precipitation reaction between precursors of cobalt and NH3. The effect of different parameters such as concentration of NH3 and precursors of cobalt on the size and photocatalytic activity of the products was investigated. The achieved nanoparticles were characterized by X-ray powder diffraction analysis, field emission scanning electron mic...

Titania has attracted considerable interest for use in water purification applications due to its excellent photocatalytic activity. To further improve the efficiency of photocatalysis, numerous nanostructures (i.e. nanoparticles, nanotubes, and nanowires) have been proposed to increase the surface area of titania. Despite the high photocatalytic performance of the nanostructured titania, subse...