10th International Aerosol Conference September 2 - September 7, 2018 America's Center Convention Complex St. Louis, Missouri, USA
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Single Step Synthesis of N/Ti3+ Co-Doped TiO2 Photocatalyst in a Flowing Microdroplet
LIANG-YI LIN, Shalinee Kavadiya, Yao Nie, Bedia Begum Karakocak, Pratim Biswas, Washington University in St. Louis
Abstract Number: 560 Working Group: Materials Synthesis
Abstract TiO2 has been widely investigated as a semiconductor photocatalyst in many areas like air/water purification, hydrogen energy, and conversion of carbon dioxide into fuels (e.g., CO and CH4). Nevertheless, the realization of TiO2 materials for practical uses has been impeded by its insufficient catalytic efficiency, which mainly originates from the fast recombination of photogenerated electron-hole pairs. Moreover, its wide band gap (~3.2 eV) makes it active only in the UV region, so it does not to utilize most of the solar spectrum. In this study, a visible-light-active nitrogen (N)/Ti3+ codoped TiO2 particle is developed for CO2 photoreduction. The N/Ti3+-TiO2 is directly synthesized in micrometer-sized droplets through a simple and continuous furnace aerosol process for the first time. Titanium nitrate and hydrazine monohydrate are used as precursors. The UV-Vis results revealed that the band gap of the aerosol-made N/Ti3+-TiO2 was drastically reduced to 1.53 eV, much lower than that of the pristine TiO2. And the photocatalytic activity tests showed that the N/Ti3+-TiO2 displayed an average CO production rate of 47.2 μmol g-1 h-1, which is about 8.9 times as high as that of commercial Degussa-P25 under UV-Vis-NIR light. The crystallinity, bandgap, and surface defect of the material were tailored by manipulating the furnace temperature and N2H4/Ti molar ratio, and detailed analyses on the physicochemical properties and the structure-photoactivity relationship of the obtained materials are systematically investigated. This study provides a new insight into the design of high-performance semiconductor materials for a wide range photocatalytic applications.