Morphology Regulation and Oxygen Vacancy Construction Synergistically Boosting the Piezocatalytic Degradation and Pure Water Splitting of SrTiO<sub>3</sub>
Yiwei He, Na Tian, Yue An, Rongjun Sun, Yihe Zhang, Hongwei Huang
Abstract
Abstract In recent years, the development of high‐efficiency piezoelectric materials is an effective means to make full use of the mechanical energy widely existing in the environment. However, there are few reports on multi‐strategies synergistically improving piezocatalytic activity, and the mechanism of synergistic enhancement of piezocatalytic activity also receives less attention. Herein, the SrTiO 3 nanorods decorated with tunable surface oxygen vacancy concentrations are prepared. Oxygen vacancy‐optimized SrTiO 3 nanorods exhibit efficient and undifferentiated piezocatalytic degradation activities for both anionic and cationic dyes under ultrasonic vibration. More importantly, it can split water into H 2 and H 2 O 2 with high production rates of 540 and 332 µmol g −1 h −1 without adding any sacrificial agents and cocatalysts, respectively. Mechanism analyses demonstrate that the 1D structure is beneficial to mechanical energy harvesting, and the surface oxygen vacancy induces larger surface asymmetry and piezoelectric response, synergically enhancing the piezocatalytic activity of SrTiO 3 nanorods. In addition, metal deposition experiments under different conditions show that SrTiO 3 nanorods possess abundant reactive catalytic sites in the piezocatalytic reaction process. This work provides a further understanding of piezocatalysis in piezoelectric nanomaterials and is important for the development of efficient piezoelectric catalysts.