Enhanced photocatalytic activity by Cu2O nanoparticles integrated H2Ti3O7 nanotubes

Current hydrodesulfurization (HDS) technology is hard to

a

remove thiols and refractory thiophenic compounds to a minimum in fuels. Moreover, the HDS technology requires severe operation conditions, along with other disadvantages in deep desulfurization. Therefore, considerable attention has been paid to non-HDS techniques, such as adsorption, biodesulfurization and photocatalytic oxidation, etc. Among them, the photocatalytic oxidation desulfurization is the most ideal "green chemistry" technology for deep desulfurization with mild operating conditions. Some researchers have reported nanocomposite as an effective photocatalytic functional material than the host alone, such as Nb6O17@Fe2O3, Cu2O@TiO2 nanotube arrays, etc.

Titanate nanotubes attracted a wide attention for the high photocatalytic activity under UV light irradiation. However, titanates have a relatively wide band gap and is utilize only under UV light, thus the photocatalytic activity is limitation. Moreover, when Cu2O is used as a photocatalyst alone, it is a limitation what the electrons and holes excited by light cannot be transferred efficiently and are easy to recombine. Some team of researchers introduced an innovative strategy by compositing Cu2O nanoparticles with titanate nanotubes, which will result in the stronger visible spectral response and wider absorbance. This technology provides a new approach to reduce the bandgap energy and prolong the separation of photo-generated electron-hole pairs, which resulted in better photocatalytic activities for photodegradation of organic pollutants more thoroughly.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-photocatalytic-cu2o-nanoparticles-h2ti3o7-nanotubes.html#jCp