Catalysis Today, Vol.335, 166-172, 2019
Highly efficient Cu induced photocatalysis for visible-light hydrogen evolution
Coinage metal (Au, Ag, Cu) induced photocatalysis has emerged as a promising strategy in developing visible-light responsive photocatalysts. Though much progress has been made, yet researchers in this field faced great challenges from both low efficiency and rigorously relying on noble metal Au. In this work, a series of Cu/SrTiO3 with gradually increased Cu particle size from 2.8 to 7.7 nm were successfully prepared with in situ multistep photodeposition method. A highly efficient visible-light photocatalytic H-2 evolution is achieved over 0.5 wt% Cu/SiTiO3 with an average Cu particle size of 3.9 nm, which reaches 5 fold as compared with its counterpart Au. As far as we know, it is the first time that Cu induced visible-light photocatalytic water splitting show prominently superior activity than that of Au under the same conditions. Further study reveals that the increase of Cu particle size effectively mitigates Fano interference between interband transition and localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR), which extends the photo-induced carriers lifetime. The discovery here is supposed to ignite great research interests in exploring efficient and nonprecious Cu induced visible-light photocatalysis.