Abstract
The synthesis, structure, and photocatalytic water splitting performance of two new titania (TiO2)/gold(Au)/Bombyx mori silk hybrid materials are reported. All materials are monoliths with diameters of up to ca. 4.5 cm. The materials are macroscopically homogeneous and porous with surface areas between 170 and 210 m2/g. The diameter of the TiO2 nanoparticles (NPs) – mainly anatase with a minor fraction of brookite – and the Au NPs are on the order of 5 and 7–18 nm, respectively. Addition of poly(ethylene oxide) to the reaction mixture enables pore size tuning, thus providing access to different materials with different photocatalytic activities. Water splitting experiments using a sunlight simulator and a Xe lamp show that the new hybrid materials are effective water splitting catalysts and produce up to 30 mmol of hydrogen per 24 h. Overall the article demonstrates that the combination of a renewable and robust scaffold such as B. mori silk with a photoactive material provides a promising approach to new monolithic photocatalysts that can easily be recycled and show great potential for application in lightweight devices for green fuel production.
Highlights
Fossil fuel availability is one of the pressing issues today
In 1972 Fujishima and Honda reported that TiO2 is able to split water [5], a seminal discovery that has led to a wealth of studies on photocatalytic water splitting [6,7,8,9,10]
The current study focuses on B. mori silk rather than cotton as a scaffold for photocatalyst synthesis
Summary
In light of a growing world population and the corresponding increasing energy demand worldwide there is a need for alternative, sustainable, and cheap fuels [1,2]. One of the limitations of H2 is the efficient and sustainable H2 production. The water splitting catalyst needs to have a certain set of properties. Most prominently, it should have a bandgap of at least 1.23 eV to provide the energy needed to split water. Numerous water-splitting catalysts with various efficiencies have been reported [6,7,8,11,12,13]
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