TiO2 nanotube arrays modified with Cr-doped SrTiO3 nanocubes for highly efficient hydrogen evolution under visible light.

In recent decades, solar-driven hydrogen production over semiconductors has attracted tremendous interest owing to the global energy and environmental crisis. Among various semiconductor materials, TiO2 exhibits outstanding photocatalytic properties and has been extensively applied in diverse photocatalytic and photoelectric systems. However, two major drawbacks limit practical applications, namely, high charge-recombination rate and poor visible-light utilization. In this work, heterostructured TiO2 nanotube arrays grafted with Cr-doped SrTiO3 nanocubes were fabricated by simply controlling the kinetics of hydrothermal reactions. It was found that coupling TiO2 nanotube arrays with regular SrTiO3 nanocubes can significantly improve the charge separation. Meanwhile, doping Cr cations into SrTiO3 nanocubes proved to be an effective and feasible approach to enhance remarkably the visible-light response, which was also confirmed by theoretical calculations. As a result, the rate of photoelectrochemical hydrogen evolution of these novel heteronanostructures is an order of magnitude larger than those of TiO2 nanotube arrays and other previously reported SrTiO3 /TiO2 nanocomposites under visible-light irradiation. Furthermore, the as-prepared Cr-doped SrTiO3 /TiO2 heterostructures exhibit excellent durability and stability, which are favorable for practical hydrogen production and photoelectric nanodevices.