Titania-based photocatalysts—crystal growth, doping and heterostructuring

• DOI: 10.1039/b909930a
• Publication Date: 2009-09-18T14:54:12Z
• Authors: Gang Liu; Lianzhou Wang; Hua Gui Yang; Hui-Ming Cheng; Gao Qing (Max) Lu
• Keywords: N-Doped TIO2; Shuttle Redox Mediator; Inorganic green chemistry; 1600 Chemistry; 01 natural sciences; 7. Clean energy; Visible-light Irradiation; 620; 0104 chemical sciences; Engineering; Dominant 001 Facets; Chemical sciences; Mesoporous Tio2; Z-scheme; Sensitized Solar-cells; Electrochemistry; Electronic Band-structure; Hydrogen-production; Water-splitting System; 2505 Materials Chemistry

Semiconductor photocatalysts have important applications in renewable energy and environment fields. To overcome the serious drawbacks of low efficiency and narrow light-response range in most stable semiconductor photocatalysts, many strategies have been developed in the past decades. This review attempts to provide a comprehensive update and examination of some fundamental issues in titania (TiO2)-based semiconductor photocatalysts, such as crystal growth, doping and heterostructuring. We focus especially on recent progress in exploring new strategies to design TiO2-based photocatalysts with unique structures and properties, elucidating the chemical states and distribution of dopants in doped TiO2, designing and fabricating integrated heterostructure photocatalysts with different charge-carrier transfer pathways, and finally identifying the key factors in determining the photocatalytic efficiency of titania-based photocatalysts.