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...

Herein, MoS2/TiO2 nanobelts heterojunction have been successfully synthesized by in situ growth method for photocatalytic reduction of Cr(VI). TiO2 nanobelts (NBs) with rough surface were prepared firstly by acidic treatment process, which is beneficial for deposition and growth of MoS2 to form heterojunctions. As a result of special energy level offset and nanostructure, MoS2/TiO2 NBs composit...

Photocatalysis has emerged as a promising technique owing to its valuable applications in environmental purification. With the demand of building effective photocatalyst materials, semiconductor investigation experienced a developing process from simple chemical modification to complicated morphology design. In this review, the general relationship between morphology structures and photocatalyt...

The purpose of this research was to study the effect of doped Ag on phase transformation, morphology and photocatalytic activity of TiO2 powders. The composites powders were prepared by sol-gel method via calcinations at a temperature 400 °C for 2 h with a heating rate of 10 °C/min. The microstructure and crystallite size of TiO2 and TiO2-Ag powders were characterized by XRD, EDX and SEM. Final...

Novel semiconductor photocatalysts have been the research focus and received much attention in recent years. The key issues for novel semiconductor photocatalysts are to effectively harvest solar energy and enhance the separation efficiency of the electron-hole pairs. In this work, novel Nb3O7F/CNTs hybrid nanocomposites with enhanced photocatalytic activity have been successfully synthesized b...

Composite heteronanostructures hold promise for high photocatalytic efficiency for water splitting and the degradation of organic pollutants. However, their photocatalytic activity under broadband excitation has been challenging, until now.

CdS-sensitized Pt/TiO(2) nanosheets with exposed (001) facets were prepared by hydrothermal treatment of a Ti(OC(4)H(9))(4)-HF-H(2)O mixed solution followed by photochemical reduction deposition of Pt nanoparticles (NPs) on TiO(2) nanosheets (TiO(2) NSs) and chemical bath deposition of CdS NPs on Pt/TiO(2) NSs, successively. The UV and visible-light driven photocatalytic activity of the as-prep...

Photocatalytic membrane was successfully prepared using an efficiently high surface area TiO2 catalyst, dispersed into polyacrylonitrile matrix. The catalyst was directly synthesized using titanium triisopropanolamine as a precursor. The membranes were characterized using FT-IR, TGA, SEM and their photocatalytic performance tested, viz. stability, permeate flux and photocatalytic degradation of...

For TiO2 photocatalysts, recombination of photoexcited electrons and holes would occur in crystalline defects such as oxygen vacancies, Ti ions, and surface states. Therefore, it is believed that the density of crystalline defects should be decreased to improve the photocatalytic activity of TiO2 particles. Contrary to this common knowledge, the introduction of crystalline defects by hydrogen r...

An investigation of the optical and excitonic properties of photocatalytic compounds based on both experimental and theoretical approaches is proposed. More specifically, this paper reports, for the first time, the local-field, optical anisotropy, and excitonic effects in BiVO4, an active photocatalytic material in the visible range. The analyses are based on electron energy-loss spectroscopy m...