MOE Key Laboratory of Bioinorganic and Synthetic Chemistry, School of Chemistry, Sun Yat-Sen University, No. 135, Xingang Xi Road, Guangzhou 510275, P. R. China.
Nanoscale. 2018 Nov 7;10(41):19367-19374. doi: 10.1039/c8nr04003f. Epub 2018 Oct 11.
Owing to its excellent chemical stability and low cost, titanium dioxide (TiO) has been widely studied as a photoanode for photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting. However, TiO's practical applications in solar energy-to-synthetic fuel conversion processes have been constrained by its inherently poor ability to transport photogenerated electrons and holes. In this paper, we report Ta-doped porous TiO nanorod arrays on Ta foil (Ta-PTNA) that do not possess this issue and that can thus efficiently photoelectrocatalyze water oxidation, helping the production of H (a clean fuel) from water at the expense of solar light. The materials are synthesized by a new, facile synthetic approach involving the hydrothermal treatment of a TiO precursor with Ta foil, without seeds and templates, and followed by calcination of the product. Besides serving as a source of Ta dopant atoms, Ta foil is found to play a vital role in the formation of nanopores in the materials. The material obtained with hydrothermal treatment at 180 °C for 10 h (Ta-PTNA-10), in particular, affords very large photocurrent density and very high photoconversion efficiency (0.32% at 0.79 V vs. RHE, which is better than those of many previously reported photocatalysts and ∼4 times larger than that of undoped TiO nanorod arrays). Ta-PTNAs' remarkable PEC catalytic performance is found to be due to their nanoporous structure and high electronic conductivity.
由于其优异的化学稳定性和低成本，二氧化钛（TiO）已被广泛研究作为光电化学（PEC）水分解的光阳极。然而，TiO 在太阳能到合成燃料转化过程中的实际应用受到其固有地差的光电生载流子传输能力的限制。在本文中，我们报告了在钽箔上具有 Ta 掺杂多孔 TiO 纳米棒阵列（Ta-PTNA），不存在这个问题，因此可以有效地光电催化水氧化，帮助从水中生产 H（一种清洁燃料），代价是消耗太阳能。该材料通过一种新的简便合成方法合成，涉及 Ta 箔上 TiO 前驱体的水热处理，无需种子和模板，然后对产物进行煅烧。除了作为 Ta 掺杂原子的来源外，Ta 箔还被发现对材料中纳米孔的形成起着至关重要的作用。特别是，在 180°C 下水热处理 10 小时（Ta-PTNA-10）获得的材料提供了非常大的光电流密度和非常高的光电转换效率（在 0.79 V vs. RHE 时为 0.32%，优于许多先前报道的光催化剂，比未掺杂的 TiO 纳米棒阵列大约 4 倍）。Ta-PTNAs 的卓越 PEC 催化性能归因于其纳米多孔结构和高电子导电性。
