It is known that TiO2 exhibits good photocatalytic properties which could be used in various commercial applications such as water and air purification or photo-induced biodegradation of microbes. TiO2 occurs in nature in the form of three crystal polymorphs: anatase, brookite and rutile. For photocatalytic applications only anatase and rutile are of interest, however anatase shows greater phot...

A novel heterostructure was first synthesized by directly depositing photocatalytic inert ZnO2 onto facet {201} of brookite nanorods. The heterostructure thus obtained was found to show a superior photocatalytic activity under UV-light irradiation. The exceptional photocatalytic performance was due to the band-structure match between ZnO2 and brookite as well as synergic charge accumulation by ...

The facet-engineered surface and interface design for photocatalytic materials has been proven as a versatile approach to enhance their photocatalytic performance. This review article encompasses some recent advances in the facet engineering that has been performed to control the surface of mono-component semiconductor systems and to design the surface and interface structures of multi-componen...

Three kinds of N-doped mesoporous TiO₂ hollow spheres with different N-doping contents, surface area, and pore size distributions were prepared based on a sol-gel synthesis and combined with a calcination process. Melamine formaldehyde (MF) microspheres have been used as sacrificial template and cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) or polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) was selected as pore-directing ...

One-dimensional (1D) CdS@ZnS core-shell nanocomposites were successfully synthesized via a two-step solvothermal method. Preformed CdS nanowires with a diameter of ca. 45 nm and a length up to several tens of micrometers were coated with a layer of ZnS shell by the reaction of zinc acetate and thiourea at 180 °C for 10 h. It was found that uniform ZnS shell was composed of ZnS nanoparticles wit...

Platinum-ion-doped TiO2 (Pt(ion)-TiO2) was synthesized by a sol-gel method, and its visible light photocatalytic activities were successfully demonstrated for the oxidative and reductive degradation of chlorinated organic compounds. Pt(ion)-TiO2 exhibited a yellow-brown color, and its band gap was lower than that of undoped TiO2 by about 0.2 eV. The flat band potential of Pt(ion)-TiO2 was posit...