Catalysis Science & Technology 2018-04-12

Synergistic design for enhancing solar-to-hydrogen conversion over TiO2 based ternary hybrid

Jie xiao, Yanzhu Luo, Zixin Yang, Yonggang Xiang, Xiaohu Zhang, Hao Chen

Index: 10.1039/C8CY00470F

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Abstract

Enhancing the visible light responsive and photoactivity of TiO2 is strategic significance and the hottest research frontier. Traditional papers focus on extending the universality of each methods with series of different mechanisms, but rare work discovers the huge importance of the synergistic enhancing effect when two or more conventional strategies are combined on one TiO2 nanoparticle. Herein, a ternary pizza-like BE-Au-TiO2 ¬hybrid is deliberately designed based on a conjugated polymer (modified poly(benzothiadiazole) flake, B-BT-1,4-E, noted as BE) acting as photosensitizer, Au nanoparticles serving as surface plasmon resonance (SPR) source, and TiO2 for electron collecting and H2 production media. The mechanisms of sensitization and SPR-enhancing can be combined together to overcome the drawbacks of insufficient electron separation and transfer over each mono-mechanism, and significantly improve the internal electron transfer efficiency. Finally, the visible light driven H2 production rate of BE-Au-TiO2 ¬hybrid is ~1.9 and ~68 times than that of BE-TiO2 and Au-TiO2 respectively, and a high AQY of 7.8% at 420 nm is obtained. This work opens a new window leading to design highly efficient photocatalytic H2 production performances.