In recent years, semiconductor photocatalytic process has shown a great potential as a lowcost, environmental friendly and sustainable treatment technology to align with the“zero” waste scheme in the water/wastewater industry. The ability of this advanced oxidation technology has been widely demonstrated to remove persistent organic compounds and microorganisms in water. This paper presents the...

Plasmonics has remained a prominent and growing field over the past several decades. The coupling of various chemical and photo phenomenon has sparked considerable interest in plasmon-mediated photocatalysis. Given plasmonic photocatalysis has only been developed for a relatively short period, considerable progress has been made in improving the absorption across the full solar spectrum and the...

A novel vapor–liquid–solid epitaxy (VLSE) process has been developed to synthesize high-density semiconductor nanowire arrays. The nanowires generally are single crystalline and have diameters of 10–200nm and aspect ratios of 10–100. The areal density of the array can readily approach 10 cm . Results based on Si and ZnO nanowire systems are reported here. Because of their single crystallinity a...

Many recent studies have been reported on the photodegradation of the organic compounds in industrial wastewater in the presence of TiO2 semiconductor as photocatalyst. Heterogeneous photocatalysts using Iron as a dopant metal, so far, have been reported for various environmental applications. This paper highlights the recent advances and applications of Fe-TiO2 photocatalysis for the degradati...

Semiconductor-metal hybrid nanostructures offer a highly controllable platform for light-induced charge separation, with direct relevance for their implementation in photocatalysis. Advances in the synthesis allow for control over the size, shape and morphology, providing tunability of the optical and electronic properties. A critical determining factor of the photocatalytic cycle is the metal ...

The enhanced photocatalytic performance of doped graphene(GR)/semiconductor nanocomposites have recently been widely observed, but an understanding of the underlying mechanisms behind it is still out of reach. As a model system to study the effect of dopants, we investigate the electronic structures and optical properites of doped GR/Ag 3 PO 4 nanocomposites using the first-principles calculati...

The development of synthetic systems for the conversion of solar energy into chemical fuels is a research goal that continues to attract growing interest owing to its potential to provide renewable and storable energy in the form of a 'solar fuel'. Dye-sensitised photocatalysis (DSP) with molecular catalysts is a relatively new approach to convert sunlight into a fuel such as H2 and is based on...

Semiconductor photocatalysis holds promising keys to address various energy and environmental challenges. Most studies to date are based on ensemble analysis, which may mask critical photocatalytic kinetics in single nanocatalysts. Here we report a study of imaging photocatalytic hydrogen production of single CdS nanoparticles with a plasmonic microscopy in an in operando manner. Surprisingly, ...