Nanoporous Pt/TiO2 nanocomposites with greatly enhanced photocatalytic performance

作者:Shi, Wenyu; Song, Yanyan; Zhang, Xiaolong; Duan, Dong; Wang, Haiyang; Sun, Zhanbo*
来源:Journal of the Chinese Chemical Society, 2018, 65(11): 1286-1292.
DOI:10.1002/jccs.201700251

摘要

In this work, nanoporous titanium dioxide (TiO2) and Pt/TiO2 composites were obtained by dealloying melt-spun Al-Si-Ti and Al-Si-Ti-Pt alloys, respectively. The structures had large specific surface areas, small pore diameters, and large pore volumes. Measurements revealed that nanoporous TiO2 had a favorable photocatalytic performance in the degradation of methyl orange (MO). For Pt/TiO2 nanocomposites, approximately 98% of the MO solution degraded in 50 min. It is shown that the significant enhancement of the photocatalytic performance of Pt/TiO2 is a result of the large specific surface area and the synergistic effect between TiO2 and metallic Pt, which reduced the bandgap of TiO2 and expanded the absorption range. Moreover, the Schottky barrier formation at the interfaces of Pt/TiO2 composites reduced the rate of electron-hole (e-h(+)) pair recombination, which contributed to the improvement of the photocatalytic performance.