Visible-light activation of TiO2 photocatalysts: Advances in theory and experiments

By Vinodkumar Etacheri, C. D. Valentin, J. Schneider, D. Bahnemann, S. Pillai. 2015

1,283 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The remarkable achievement by Fujishima and Honda (1972) in the photo-electrochemical water splitting results in the extensive use of TiO 2 nanomaterials for environmental purification and energy storage/conversion applications. Though there are many advantages for the TiO 2 compared to other semiconductor photocatalysts, its band gap of 3.2 eV restrains application to the UV-region of the electromagnetic spectrum ( λ ≤ 387.5 nm). As a result, development of visible-light active titanium dioxide is one of the key challenges in the field of semiconductor photocatalysis. In this review, advances in the strategies for the visible light activation, origin of visible-light activity, and electronic structure of various visible-light active TiO 2 photocatalysts are discussed in detail. It has also been shown that if appropriate models are used, the theoretical insights can successfully be employed to develop novel catalysts to enhance the photocatalytic performance in the visible region. Recent developments in theory and experiments in visible-light induced water splitting, degradation of environmental pollutants, water and air purification and antibacterial applications are also reviewed. Various strategies to identify appropriate dopants for improved visible-light absorption and electron–hole separation to enhance the photocatalytic activity are discussed in detail, and a number of recommendations are also presented.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/447aca722dc23a0092e017cb18c13070703afaf7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Materials Chemistry

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Citations in the corpus

Recent Advances in TiO2 Films Prepared by Sol-gel Methods for Photocatalytic Degradation of Organic Pollutants and Antibacterial Activities (2019, background): “in slow photocatalytic degradation rates [27].”
Recent advances in TiO2-functionalized textile surfaces (2021, background): “strategies to increase the efficiency of the use of visible light [49,52,53, 55,56,59].”
Recent advances based on the synergetic effect of adsorption for removal of dyes from waste water using photocatalytic process. (2017, background): “Till today many researchers have demonstrated numerous photocatalytic activities of various photocatalytic materials for degradation of different organic compounds present in water including dyes (Etacheri et al., 2015; Abou-Gamra and Ahmed, 2016; Wu et al., 2015; Hamad et al., 2016).”