Synthesis, Characterization, and Photocatalytic Properties of New Heteronanostructures Based on Niobium Oxihydroxides

Abstract

Heteronanostructured photocatalysts have attracted some good attention due to the enhanced catalytic activity of the multi-component material rather than its pure form. In this work, we successfully synthesized and characterized new Heteronanostructured samples of the semiconductor Nb3O7OH decorated with different metal loadings of Pt, Au, Cu, Pd, and Ag via a photodeposition technique. The compounds were characterized by XRD, UV-Vis absorbance, SEM, EDX, TEM, and Atomic absorption.

We first investigated the effect of Pt loading on catalytic H2 production. The obtained results showed that the spillover mechanism is possible for low Pt loading which is responsible for the high production rate.

In the second part, we studied the photocatalytic degradation of Rhodamine B, and the best one of the tested compounds until now is the gold decorated compound with 0.5% as metal loading. Future work will include the exploration of the rest of the compounds and the effect of loading percentage will be studied regarding the effectiveness.