Synergistic role of hydrogen treatment and heterojunction in H-WO/TiO NT/Ti foil-based photoanodes for photoelectrochemical wastewater detoxification and antibacterial activity.

The process of photoelectrochemical wastewater detoxification is limited by significant charge recombination, which is difficult to suppress with efficient single-material photoanodes. We demonstrated the effectiveness of hydrogen treatment in evaluating charge separation properties in WO/TiO NT/Ti foil heterojunction photoanodes. The influence of varying hydrogen annealing (200-400 °C) on the structural and photoelectrochemical properties of WO/TiO NS/NT heterojunction is studied systematically. Additionally, after hydrogen treatment of pristine WO/TiO NT/Ti foil photoanodes, substoichiometric H-WO/TiO NT-300 achieved the 1.21 mA/cm photocurrent density, which is 8.06 and 3.27 times than TiO NT and WO/TiO NT. The hydrogen-treated H-WO/TiO NT-300 electrode exhibits 3 times greater bulk efficiencies than the WO/TiO NT electrode due to the production of oxygen vacancies at the interface. Additionally, optimum H-WO/TiO NS/NT-300 photoanode exhibited 93.8% E. coli and 99.8% BPA decomposition efficiencies. The present work shows the effectiveness of microwave-assisted H-WO/TiO NT heterojunction photoanodes for organic decomposition and antibacterial activity in a neutral environment without surface-loaded co-catalysts.