Advanced Functional Materials
Advanced Functional Materials
4 years ago

Synergistic Effect of Si Doping and Heat Treatments Enhances the Photoelectrochemical Water Oxidation Performance of TiO2 Nanorod Arrays

Synergistic Effect of Si Doping and Heat Treatments Enhances the Photoelectrochemical Water Oxidation Performance of TiO2 Nanorod Arrays
Qinglong Liu, Guangzheng Yuan, Xing Huang, Peihua Zhu, Yuling Wei, Changlong Chen, Yi Cao, Ranran Lu
TiO2 is a very promising photocatalytic material due to its merits including low cost, nontoxicity, high chemical stability, and photocorrosion resistance. However, it is also known that TiO2 is a wide bandgap material, and it is still challenging to achieve high photocatalytic performance driven by solar light. In this paper, silicon-doped TiO2 nanorod arrays are vertically grown on fluorine-doped tin oxide substrates and then are heat treated both in air and in vacuum. It is found that the silicon doping together with the heat treatment brings synergic effect to TiO2 nanorod films by increasing the crystallinity, producing abundant oxygen vacancies, enhancing the hydrophilicity as well as improving the electronic properties. When used as photoanodes in photoelectrochemical water splitting, under the condition of AM 1.5G simulated solar irradiation and without using any cocatalysts, these nanorod films show photocurrent density as high as 0.83 mA cm−2 at a potential of 1.23 V versus reversible hydrogen electrode, which is much higher than that of the TiO2 nanorod films without doping or heat treating. The silicon-doped TiO2 nanorod array films described in this paper are envisioned to provide valuable platforms for supporting catalysts and cocatalysts for efficient solar-light-assisted water oxidation and other solar-light-driven photocatalytic applications. TiO2 nanorod arrays subjected to Si doping and heat treatments achieve much-improved electronic properties due to the improvement of the crystallinity and the increase of the donor density, which are envisioned to provide valuable platforms for supporting catalysts and cocatalysts for efficient solar-light-assisted water oxidation and other solar-light-driven photocatalytic applications.

Publisher URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi

DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201701575

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.