TiO2 is the important material that applied on clean energy and pollutant degradation. However the photoelectric conversion efficiency of TiO2 is limited due to the poor visible light response and the high recombination of photogenerated charges. Recently, Professor Li Qiuye, Professor Yang Jianjun and Professor Zhang min from the Environmental and Energy Catalysis Group synthesized a special kind of TiO2 nanocrystals with the coexistence of surface oxygen vacancies and single-electron-trapped oxygen vacancies, and studied the effect of the concentration and type of oxygen vacancies on the light absorption and photocatalytic hydrogen production activity. Furthermore, the Z-scheme TiO2/BCN heterojunction is constructed using the surface oxygen vacancies as the electron transfer layer, which can further improve the photocatalytic performance of hydrogen production. The series of works have been published on Catal. Sci. Technol., 2018, 8, 2809–2817；Catal. Sci. Technol., 2018, 8, 3629-3637.（IF=5.365）。
The researchers from the Environmental and Energy Catalysis Group devote to studying the development and mechanism of the novel TiO2 with oxygen vacancies. Recently, a series of work has been published in Applied Catalysis B: Environmental, 2017, 206, 300–307; Applied Catalysis B: Environmental, 2017, 212, 106-114, and Applied Surface Science, 2018, 428, 640–647. Among them, the report about the Z-scheme g-C3N4-TiO2 photocatalyst ( published Applied Surface Science, 2017, 391, 184-193) has been cited by 56 times at the moment, which is appraised as the ESI highly cited papers.
The study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21673066、51702087、21703054).
