N-Doped TiO₂ Nanobelts with Coexposed (001) and (101) Facets and Their Highly Efficient Visible-Light-Driven Photocatalytic Hydrogen Production

Abstract

To narrow the band gap (3.2 eV) of TiO2 and extend its practical applicability under sunlight, the doping with nonmetal elements has been used to tune TiO2 electronic structure. However, the doping also brings new recombination centers among the photoinduced charge carriers, which results in a quantum efficiency loss accordingly. It has been proved that the {101} facets of anatase TiO2 are beneficial to generating and transmitting more reductive electrons to promote the H2-evolution in the photoreduction reaction, and the {001} facets exhibit a higher photoreactivity to accelerate the reaction involved of photogenerated hole. Thus, it was considered by us that using the surface heterojunction composed of both {001} and {101} facets may depress the disadvantage of N doping. Fortunately, we successfully synthesized anatase N-doped TiO2 nanobelts with a surface heterojunction of coexposed (101) and (001) facets. As expected, it realized the charge pairs' spatial separation and showed higher photocatalytic activity under a visible-light ray: a hydrogen generation rate of 670 μmol h(-1) g(-1) (much higher than others reported previously in literature of N-doped TiO2 nanobelts).