Enhanced hydrogen generation using ZrO2-modified coupled ZnO/TiO2 nanocomposites in the absence of noble metal co-catalyst

Synthesis of Bi2S3nanorods supported on ZrO2semiconductor as an efficient photocatalyst for hydrogen production under UV and visible light

“…ZrO 2 has been used as a photocatalyst due to its high stability, low cost, availability and nontoxicity . ZrO 2 allows the photocatalytic decomposition of water, the electronic position of the ZrO 2 conduction band is more negative than the potential of H 2 /H 2 O resulting in a higher driving force for H 2 production, and the oxidation potential of the ZrO 2 valence band is suited at more positive potentials than O 2 /H 2 O. However, as a wide band‐gap semiconductor (5.0 eV), ZrO 2 can only be excited under UV‐light irradiation.…”

“…Hence, the improvement of its photocatalytic activity under visible light has been investigated and found to be achievable by several techniques, such as photocatalysis, where the coupling of two semiconductors may enhance the efficiency of electron–hole separation and increase the lifetime and interfacial charge transfer rate of the photogenerated charge carriers. The coupling of semiconductors with different band edges offers the possibility of new photocatalytic materials . An important aspect of the coupling of semiconductors originates from the formation of a heterojunction at the interface that enhances photoexcited electron/hole pair separation, thus effectively reducing the recombination.…”

“…The coupling of semiconductors with different band edges offers the possibility of new photocatalytic materials. 12 An important aspect of the coupling of semiconductors originates from the formation of a heterojunction at the interface that enhances photoexcited electron/hole pair separation, thus effectively reducing the recombination. In addition, the coupling of semiconductors having appropriate band edges may produce more efficient photocatalysts.…”

Synthesis and Characterization of ZnO-ZrO2 Nanocomposites for Photocatalytic Degradation and Mineralization of Phenol

“…Because of this, ZrO 2 requires UV-C light (<280 nm) to be excited and generate electron-hole pairs [2]. A strategy to overcome this is by doping ZrO 2 with different transition metal ions or coupling with other metal oxides with dissimilar band edge [3]. Composites made of two metal oxides have attracted much attention in different researches because they possess improved physicochemical properties than the pure oxides.…”

Operational Conditions Affecting Hydrogen Production by the Photoreforming of Organic Compounds using Titania Nanoparticles with Gold

“…[90] However, the most studied material is TiO 2 . [42,[91][92][93][94][95][96][97] Usually,t he catalytic proper-ties of these materials are improved by using sacrificial agents or modificationt echniques.O rganic species such as alcohols [61,66,[98][99][100][101][102] and glycerol [52,53,[103][104][105][106][107][108] are typicals acrificial agents used as electron donors or hole scavengers.T here are three main usual modificationt echniques to improve the photocatalytic process:c ombinationw ith metals, [41, 44, 45, 49, 51, 52, 58, 60, 61, 64, 67, 78, 84, 87-89, 92, 94-96, 99-102, 104, 105, 109-124] combination with other semiconductors, [63,67,116,117,121,[125][126][127][128][129][130][131][132][133][134][135] and cation or anion doping. [103,106] These many options createavery wide net of possible combinations,w hich makes it difficult to optimize and quantify the effect of the numerous variables affectingh ydrogen productivity.…”