Abstract
Considerable efforts have been devoted to enhancing the photocatalytic activity and solar energy utilization of photocatalysts. Photocatalysis has attracted much attention in recent years due to its potential in solving energy and environmental issues. The fabrication of various materials (coupled or doped) to form heterojunctions provides an effective way to better harvest solar energy and to facilitate charge separation and transfer, thus enhancing the photocatalytic activity and stability. Efficient light absorption and charge separation are two of the key factors for the exploration of high performance photocatalytic systems, which is generally difficult to be obtained in a single photocatalyst. In this review, we briefly summarizes the recent development heterostructured semiconductors, including the preparation and performances of semiconductor/semiconductor junctions, semiconductor/metal junctions, and their mechanism in the area of environmental remediation and water splitting for enhanced light harvesting and charge separation/transfer, describe some of the progress and resulting achievements, and discuss the future prospects. The scope of this review covers a variety of type photocatalysts, focusing particularly on Ceria (CeO<sub>2</sub>) heterostructured photocatalysts. We expect this review to provide a guideline for readers to gain a clear picture of fabrication and application of different type heterostructured photocatalysts.
Highlights
Due to the development of various industries in modern society, water pollution has become one of the most serious environmental problems
Tong and co-workers investigated the photocatalytic performance of Cadmium sulphide (CdS)/CeOx nanowires and CdS/CeO2 nanospheres prepared by electrochemical process, and found that the both composites exhibited hydrogen evolution rate of 223 and 473.6 μmolh-1g-1, respectively, higher than that of pure CeO2 under visible light illumination
The results demonstrate that the degradation efficiency of gC3N4/CeO2/zinc oxide (ZnO) composite to methyl blue (MB) is much higher than those of pure g-C3N4, ZnO and g-C3N4/CeO2 nanosheets under visible light irradiation
Summary
Due to the development of various industries in modern society, water pollution has become one of the most serious environmental problems. Dyes are very stable to light and oxidation due to the complex aromatic molecular structures, but this causes damage to the environment and dramatically threatens human health [3,4,5]. The main disadvantages of these methods include the production of toxic sludge, high operational cost, technical limitations, lack of effective color reduction and sensitivity to a variable wastewater input. It is a problem because these dye compounds in wastewater ordinarily contain one or several benzene ring and cannot be decomposed in chemical and biological processes. Developing a photocatalyst that can efficaciously degrade organic contaminants under visible-light irradiation is a highly promising direction in the application of wastewater treatment. Formation of heterojunction between two semiconductors allows the interaction of the band structure which effectively prevents the electron hole recombination thereby enhance the photocatalytic activity [23, 27]
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