Design and synthesis of porous M-ZnO/CeO2 microspheres as efficient plasmonic photocatalysts for nonpolar gaseous molecules oxidation: Insight into the role of oxygen vacancy defects and M=Ag, Au…

By Xizhuang Liang, Peng Wang, Yugang Gao, Huining Huang, Fengxia Tong, Qianqian Zhang, Zeyan Wang, Yuanyuan Liu, Zhaoke Zheng, Ying Dai and 1 more. 2020

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract In this paper, porous microsphere M-ZnO/CeO2 (M = Ag, Au) plasmonic photocatalyst was prepared through a simple hydrothermal method and in situ photo-deposition. This photocatalyst shows excellent stability and high efficiency in the complete mineralization of nonpolar gaseous molecules (CH4 and C2H4) under the simulated sunlight. The appreciable performance improvements are caused by the formation of heterojunctions and oxygen vacancy defects, the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) of noble metal nanoparticles as well as the 3D porous microsphere structures. Especially in this work, we systematically studied the effect of concentration changes of oxygen vacancy defects on photocatalytic performance by XPS, EPR and Raman characterization. Furthermore, a possible mechanism of photo-oxidation reaction in plasmonic photocatalyst system is discussed below. This study provides new inspiration for designing other plasmonic photocatalysts to remove nonpolar gaseous molecules.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/093c915ad9c3d2c8dd0e88bd47e70d6ec88fef26