Design of hollow nanostructured photocatalysts for clean energy production

Abstract

Hollow nanostructured functional photocatalysts have exhibited great promise for various clean energy production. A great deal of foison has been expended to the design and fabrication of hollow nanostructured photocatalysts with varying compositional and geometric features in the past few years. However, the relevance between their special structure and clean energy production performance has not been adequately reviewed in the literature. Here, some typical examples of designing and fabricating hollow nanostructured photocatalysts to solve the problems of various clean energy production, such as H2 evolution, CO2 reduction, N2 fixation, H2O2 production and fine chemical synthesis are highlighted. The relevant influencing factors between structures engineering and performance are discussed deeply, which makes for better design the hollow nanostructured photocatalysts to meet the needs of particular applications and synchronously enrich the variety of the hollow nanostructured materials. Finally, the possible directions of hollow nanostructured photocatalysts design to deal with the energy crisis and further enhance the performance of clean energy production are also discussed.