The influence of hydrothermal synthesis, thermal post-treatment at 500 °C and Mo content on a series of Bi1-x/3V1-xMoxO4 (0.02 < x < 0.15) photocatalysts was investigated for methylene blue (MB) degradation and O2 evolution. As Mo incorporation stabilizes the formation of tetragonal BiVO4 phases, only calcined Bi0.99V0.98Mo0.02O4 compounds showed good photocatalytic performance in MB decomposit...

Photocatalytic reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) into hydrocarbon fuels such as methane is an attractive strategy for simultaneously harvesting solar energy and capturing this major greenhouse gas. Incessant research interest has been devoted to preparing graphene-based semiconductor nanocomposites as photocatalysts for a variety of applications. In this work, reduced graphene oxide (rGO)-TiO2 ...

The traditional use of TiO2 powder as a photocatalyst for degradation of organic compounds has several post-degradation treatment problems, such as filtration, precipitation, etc. A novel method was developed to immobilize TiO2 to minimize/eliminate such problems. Polymeric membrane was used as a base material, over which the TiO2 photocatalyst was immobilized as a thin layer. Preparation and c...

Titanium dioxide (TiO2) is one of the most widely studied photocatalysts during the past decades due to its ability to photo-oxidize harmful chemicals in both air and water to CO2 in the presence of UV light. TiO2 also shows promise for energy applications such as water splitting [1], as well as in photochemical solar cells [2]. TiO2 use has also been extended to large scale commercial producti...

The g-C3N4-coupling TiO2 photocatalysts with controllable particle size as well as the interface contact were prepared by a general nonaqueous sol-gel method. The structural and morphological features of g-C3N4/TiO2 were investigated through the X-ray diffraction, Fourier transformed infrared spectra, scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy, respectively. It is found t...

This paper reports that the introduction of elemental red phosphorus (RP) into TiO2 can shift the light absorption ability from the UV to the visible region, and confirmed that the optimal RP loading and milling time can effectively improve the visible light driven-photocatalytic activity of TiO2. The resulting RP-TiO2 nanohybrids were characterized systematically by a range of techniques and t...

Freely assembled palladium nanoparticles (Pd NPs) on titania (TiO2) nano photocatalysts were successfully synthesized through a photodeposition method using natural sunlight. This synthesized heterogeneous photocatalyst (Pd/TiO2) was characterized through field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), BET s...

The electronic structures, formation energies, and band edge positions of anatase TiO2 doped with transition metals have been analyzed by ab initio band calculations based on the density functional theory with the planewave ultrasoft pseudopotential method. The model structures of transition metal-doped TiO2 were constructed by using the 24-atom 2 × 1 × 1 supercell of anatase TiO2 with one Ti a...

We report a comparative study on the photodegradation of the widely used benzodiazepine psychoactive drug alprazolam (8-chloro-1-methyl-6-phenyl-4H-[1,2,4]triazolo[4,3-a][1,4]benzodiazepine, ALP) using direct photolysis, and titanium dioxide photocatalyzed reaction. Titanium dioxide photocatalysts were prepared as nanoparticles by acidic sol-gel methods, calcined at two different temperatures, ...

TiO2 semiconducting nanoparticles are known to be photocatalysts of moderate activity due to their high band-gap and high rate of electron-hole recombination. The formation of a shell of carbon around the core of TiO2, i.e., the formation of TiO2@C nanoparticles, is believed to partly alleviate these problems. It is usually achieved by a hydrothermal treatment in a presence of a sugar derivativ...