High Photocatalytic Hydrogen Production of Ag@TiO<sub>2</sub> with Different Sizes by Simple Chemical Synthesis
Xinru Li, Nan Sun, Yaoning Bai, Yuwei Yan, Taoyuan Ouyang, Xu Wang, Xiaodi Jiang, Zichen Wang, Xiaoming Cai, Jinming Cai, Honglin Tan
Abstract
The photocatalytic enhancement of sliver-based metals compounded with semiconductor materials has been demonstrated. However, there are relatively few studies on the effect of particle size in the system on photocatalytic performance. In this paper, silver nanoparticles of two different sizes, 25 and 50 nm, were prepared by a wet chemical method and subsequently sintered to obtain a photocatalyst with a core–shell structure. The photocatalyst Ag@TiO 2 -50/150 prepared in this study has a hydrogen evolution rate as high as 4538.90 μmol·g –1 ·h –1 . It is interesting to find that when the ratio of silver core size to composite size is 1:3, the hydrogen yield is almost not affected by the silver core diameter, and the hydrogen production rate is basically the same. In addition, the rate of hydrogen precipitation in air for 9 months was still more than 9 times those of previous studies. This provides a new idea for the study of the oxidation resistance and stability of photocatalysts.