Enhanced Defect-Water Hydrogen Evolution Method For Efficient Solar Utilization: Photo-Thermal Chemical Coupling On Oxygen Vacancy

Oxygen vacancy (V-O) was identified as an effective method for the improvement of materials in the area of photocatalysis and electrocatalysis. Besides, V-O was confirmed to participate in the decomposition of water, the direct thermal application of reductive photo-induced V-O has been considered an adaptive method for solar utilization. Here, the generation and consumption of V(O)s was detected on titanium dioxide surface, base mechanism and produced hydrogen was further obtained. The photochemical activity boosted upon transition metal doping, and the water splitting performance rise to 12.97-fold result from the increased amount of photoinduced V(O)s. Furthermore, the reaction pathway density functional theory calculations exhibited the difficulty during hydrogen molecule formation, guiding the metal particles loading to improve the V(O)s reactivity. A maximum hydrogen yield was achieved on Ni/Cu-TiO2 equal to 27.01 mu mol/g-cat, which was approximately 36.0 times the behave of bare titanium dioxide. These conclusions demonstrate the obvious impact of quantity and quality of photo-induced V(O)s in V-O-based reactions, and contribute to a new approach for solar functional material engineering.