As a clean and renewable energy resource, solar energy plays a very important role in the field of new energy. Besides the conventional ways of solar energy harvesting like photovoltaic devices, photocatalysis has also became a very popular research direction. But difficulties like the lack of satisfactory visible light responsive material and low photocatalytic efficiency have limited the application of photocatalyst. In this work, ZnO/TiO2 core-shell nanorods array were fabricated with hydrothermal method and radio frequency sputtering coating method. Besides, Ag nanoparticles were deposited on the nanorods surface or the ZnO/TiO2 interface to introduce localized surface plasmon resonance. It has been shown that the photocatalytic and photoelectrochemical performance of these ZnO/TiO2 composites has been improved by Ag nanoparticles on the interface of ZnO and TiO2. Especially under visible light, recombination of electrons and holes has been depressed and a higher and more stable photocurrent has been achieved. With the time-resolved photoluminescence test, the mechanism of this improvement has been revealed. The lifetime of photoexcited carriers in the semiconductor has been greatly extended with the localized surface plasmon resonance introduced by the Ag nanoparticles.

Improvement of photoelectrochemical activity of ZnO/TiO2 core-shell nanostructure through Ag nanoparticle integration

255th National Meeting (2018)

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