The world faces numerous challenges caused by conventional fuel energy such as environmental pollution resulting from the burning products of fuels, limited storage of fossil oil, rapid increase in energy consumption, and the non-reusability of these energy sources. Exploiting and making use of clean energy (e.g. hydrogen, solar energy, tidal) is regarded as a fundamental solution to address these challenges. Among these new forms of clean energy, hydrogen is now seen as a promising candidate because of its high energy density (higher caloric values than gasoline) and wide field of applications. There are several available methods to produce hydrogen such as coal coking, heavy oil refinement and natural gas reforming or gasification. The main drawback of these methods is that they rely on non-reusable resources. In addition, the produced hydrogen gas is of a low purity (e.g. impurities of carbon compounds). Alternatively, hydrogen at a higher level of purity can be produced by electrolyzing alkaline water. Nevertheless, electrolysis of water currently faces a problem of the high cost, e.g. the high consumption of electricity that is necessary to be applied to the system. An entirely ecologically sound path would be photocatalytic water splitting to produce hydrogen (only solar energy is used). This idea has been achieved by Fujishima and Honda1 in 1972 in which they used a photoelectrochemical (PEC) configuration with a TiO2 single crystal as a photoanode and a Pt sheet as a photocathode. Hydrogen is generated on the cathode side when the TiO2 anode side is irradiated with ultraviolet (UV) light. As a result, photoelectrochemical/photochemical water splitting to generate hydrogen has attracted tremendous scientific and technological interest since 1972. In general, in order to work as an efficient photocatalyst for water splitting, TiO2 needs to be decorated with noble-metal co-catalysts or connected with a Pt counter electrode. However, it was reported in 2014 by Liu2,3 that under open circuit conditions ...


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    Title :

    Noble-Metal-Free Photocatalytic H2 Evolution from Defect-Engineered TiO2 Nanoparticles/Nanotubes ; Maßgeschneiderte Defekte: Edelmetallfreie, Photokatalytische H2 Entwicklung mittels TiO2 Nanopartikeln und TiO2 Nanoröhrchen


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    2018-01-01


    Type of media :

    Theses


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Classification :

    DDC:    629