Swapping Catalytic Active Sites from Cationic Ni to Anionic S in Nickel Sulfide Enables More Efficient Alkaline Hydrogen Generation

The removal of organic pollutants using green environmental photocatalytic degradation techniques urgently need high-performance catalysts. In this work, a facile one-step hydrothermal technique has been successfully applied to synthesize a Nb2O5 photocatalyst with uniform micro-flower structure for the degradation of methyl orange (MO) under UV irradiation. These nanocatalysts are characterized by transmission and scanning electron microscopies (TEM and SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) method, and UV-Vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS). It is found that the prepared Nb2O5 micro-flowers presents a good crystal phases and consist of 3D hierarchical nanosheets with 400–500 nm in diameter. The surface area is as large as 48.6 m2 g−1. Importantly, the Nb2O5 micro-flowers exhibit superior catalytic activity up to 99.9% for the photodegradation of MO within 20 mins, which is about 60-fold and 4-fold larger than that of without catalysts (W/O) and commercial TiO2 (P25) sample, respectively. This excellent performance may be attributed to 3D porous structure with abundant catalytic active sites.

The experimentally validated computational models developed herein, for the first time, show that Mn-promotion does not enhance the activity of the surface Na2WO4 catalytic active sites for CH4 heterolytic dissociation...

Vertical Bi2Se3 flake arrays work as counter-electrode in DSSCs due to its high electrical conductivity and abundance of catalytic active sites.