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Ti(III) Doped Titanium Dioxide: an Effective Strategy to Improve the Visible Light Photocatalytic Activity

Abstract

Seeking for clean and renewable energy resource has been a research focus for the past decades. Carbon-based fuel, the current primary energy resource, will be depleted in the near future. The environmental concern coming with the consumption of fossil fuel is more significant than ever. The sunlight incident on the earth's surface reaches as high as 1000W/m2, far exceeding the human energy needs. If an efficient and environmental benign solar energy conversion and utilization could be achieved, the energy problem will be eventually solved.

Since the first reported UV light activated photocatalyst TiO2, many materials have been synthesized and studied for their photocatalytical activity. Among of them, researchers are especially interested in these which could make H2 from water efficiently under visible light irradiation, since the energy of visible light take up a large proportion of solar energy.

Herein, we investigated the Ti3+-doped TiO2 by a facile one-step combustion method. It is found that Ti3+ extends the photoresponse of TiO2 from the UV to the visible light region, which leads to high visible-light photocatalytic activity for the generation of hydrogen gas from water.

We further studied how the synthetic conditions such as crystallinity, surface area, particle size, crystal facets distribution and etc. affected the photocatalytic activity of the partially reduced TiO2.

In addition, we found that the partially reduced TiO2 with highly active facets could be fabricated by a facile hydrothermal treatment of the Ti powder and hydrochloric acid. Without any additional reducing agent and surfactant, Ti3+ was successfully incorporated into the product, and more importantly, highly active facets developed preferentially, which is supported by the electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectra and transmission electron microscopy (TEM), respectively. The as-synthesized single crystal sample shows a great improvement in the photocatalytic H2 production activity over our previously prepared particles. It is inferred that the active facets play a crucial role for this enhancement. Measurement of the photocatalytic activity over an extended time period proved the excellent stability of the reduced TiO2 made by this approach.

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