Abstract
The interaction of organic molecules and titanium dioxide (TiO2) plays a crucial role in many industry-oriented applications and an understanding of its mechanism can be helpful for the improvement of catalytic efficiency of TiO2. Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) has been proved to be a powerful tool in characterizing reaction pathways due to its ability in providing on-site images during the catalytic process. Over the past two decades, many research interests have been focused on the elementary reaction steps, such as adsorption, diffusion, and photocatalytic reaction, occurring between organic molecules and model TiO2 surfaces. This review collects the recent studies where STM was utilized to study the interaction of TiO2 with three classes of representative organic molecules, i.e., alcohols, carboxylic acids, and aromatic compounds. STM can provide direct evidence for the adsorption configuration, diffusion route, and photocatalytic pathway. In addition, the combination of STM with other techniques, including photoemission spectroscopy (PES), temperature programmed desorption (TPD), and density functional theory (DFT), have been discussed for more insights related to organic molecules-TiO2 interaction.
Highlights
Over the last decades, the interest in titanium dioxide (TiO2 )-based materials has been increased enormously since Fujishima and Honda’s first reported the water-splitting ability of illuminatedTiO2 [1]
TiO2 (101) surface and found that upon UV illumination with the atmosphere of oxygen, some ethanol disappeared whereas large protrusions arranged in a (1 × 2) pattern formed along the [010] direction, which was assigned as carboxylate adsorb in a bidentate manner
Idriss et al studied the photocatalytic reaction of ethanol over the anatase TiO2(101) surface and found that upon UV illumination with the atmosphere of oxygen, some ethanol disappeared whereas large protrusions arranged in a (1 × 2) pattern formed along the
Summary
The interest in titanium dioxide (TiO2 )-based materials has been increased enormously since Fujishima and Honda’s first reported the water-splitting ability of illuminated. The currently widely accepted working mechanism of nanostructured TiO2 -based photocatalytic materials has been developed, first of all, by characterizing the crystal structure and morphology of catalysts using X-ray diffraction (XRD), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), and corresponding energy-dispersive X-ray. Surface science approaches represented by STM have been intensively applied in order to resolve the catalytic mechanism occurring on the TiO2 surface to find the parameters in each single step, such as adsorption, diffusion, and photo-reaction.
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