Visible light-driven photocatalysis of doped SrTiO3 tubular structure Jinwen Shi,1 Shaohua Shen,1,2,* Yubin Chen,1 Liejin Guo,1 and Samuel S. Mao2 1
International Research Center for “Solar-Hydrogen” Renewable and Clean Energy, State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Shaanxi 710049, China 2 Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA *
[email protected]
Abstract: SrTiO3 tubular structures co-doped with Cr and Ta were synthesized through a combination of solvothermal-hydrothermal processes. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) measurements of the oxidation state of Cr ions reveal that the formation of Cr6+ ions, which would serve as the non-radiative recombination centers for photogenerated electrons and holes, was suppressed without the process of high temperature hydrogen reduction. Compared to similar co-doped materials synthesized by solidstate reaction, (Cr, Ta) co-doped SrTiO3 tubular structures have significantly higher photocatalytic activity for hydrogen evolution as measured in an aqueous methanol solution under visible light irradiation. ©2012 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (160.6990) Transition-metal-doped materials; (260.5130) Photochemistry; (350.6050) Solar energy.
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Received 22 Nov 2011; revised 13 Jan 2012; accepted 13 Jan 2012; published 9 Mar 2012 12 March 2012 / Vol. 20, No. S2 / OPTICS EXPRESS A351
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1. Introduction Solar-driven water splitting for hydrogen production using semiconductor-based photocatalysts has attracted a significant amount of attention from both the fundamental science point of view and the potential as a clean energy solution. Since Fujishima and Honda’s pioneering work in 1972 [1], different classes of semiconductor materials, such as metal oxides as best represented by TiO2, have been developed and evaluated as potential candidate photocatalysts for high-efficiency solar-driven hydrogen conversion [2,3]. Considering that UV light consists of only a small portion (~4%) of the solar spectrum, the energy conversion efficiency for solar-hydrogen water splitting using TiO2 as the photocatalyst is typically
