Taylor, Sean. Photocatalytic hydrogen production using strontium titanate and supported silver nanoparticles. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3SN0C3P
DescriptionSemiconductors have been gaining interest in the field of photocatalysis due to their ability to efficiently harvest energy from light, their versatility in performing many different photocatalytic reactions, and for making electronic devices. Plasmonic metal nanoparticles have also been increasingly studied for their use in applications from spectroscopic enhancement and bioanalytics to photocatalysis. In this study we photochemically deposited silver metal nanoparticles onto the surface of strontium titanate in-situ using silver nitrate and investigated how they affect the photocatalytic production of hydrogen from glycerol and water at several silver loadings. The photocatalytic activity of the silver doped photocatalysts was also studied at different spectral regions of light. We have confirmed the presence of silver nanoparticles using UV-Vis Diffuse Reflectance. Furthermore it was found that the photocatalytic ability of the silver doped photocatalysts had a nonlinear dependence on the amount of silver loading. There were two maxima of the photocatalytic ability which we propose was due to the creation of plasmonic nanoparticles and the overloading of silver on the strontium titanate which would inhibit light absorption of the bulk photocatalyst. We also studied the kinetics of silver deposition onto the strontium titanate using Photoluminescence spectroscopy. This is due to the strontium titanate first photocatalytically reducing the silver ions into the metallic nanoparticles.