A Photo-catalytic Process for Hydrogen Production: Selecting New Semiconductors as Co-Catalysts

Abstract

Hydrogen is the ideal fuel for the future because it is clean, energy efficient, and abundant in nature. Solar photocatalytic water splitting is environmentally friendly technology with great potential for low-cost and clean hydrogen production; the simultaneous production of hydrogen with degradation of organic contaminants in water is a potential successful technology for harvesting clean energy from wastewater and help to recycle water. TiO2 has been a widely-used catalyst for photocatalytic water splitting because it is stable, non-corrosive, cost-effective and most important, its energy levels are appropriate to initiate the water-splitting reaction. Despite the many advantages of TiO2, its efficiency in the partial mineralization of the organic compounds to produce molecular hydrogen from the wastewater is still quite low. Many recent studies were focused on identifying alternate options such as the use of dopants for TiO2 in order to make solar photocatalytic water splitting with TiO2 more efficient and also enhance its visible-light response. This project is at the initial stages and we will present a literature review in order to summarize the state-of-the-art efforts for promotion of the photocatalytic activity of TiO2 via doping with different cations and ions. Its purpose is to identify (and test) suitable co-catalyst agents (i.e. semiconductors) to be doped into TiO2 for the simultaneous production of hydrogen with contaminant degradation in water solutions.